Dance With Me
A few weeks ago, I was giving my hip a break from the desk chair and decided to plop on the couch and watch a little tv. I checked out our list of DVR’d items on our cable box, and found two dance shows. (periodically Doug will go through and set it to record new things, and he must have set it to record some dance stuff for me. He’s so cute.)
One program (called Dance New York) turned out to be one of those public access-type stations (I think) and was a half hour of one camera set up in the corner of a gymnasium where a bunch of people were taking an African dance class. Over the footage of the class was text telling you about the class, the location, and the number to call to find out more. Actually kind of entertaining, since the only other way of really seeing what an African dance class is like is to bite the bullet and go to one yourself (something I’ve been interested in doing for a while now).
The second program was an actual full-on tv show, and I was pleasantly surprised. Called “Dance With Me” the show is much like the US’s “So You Think You Can Dance”, but with much less flash, and a bit more substance and artistry (imho). It is a Chinese tv show (broadcast by ImaginAsian TV) that showcases the best in amateur (although they really look like pros) dance talent in China, in a number of different dance genres. This is how their website explains it…
“So you think you can dance? But can you compete with the best dancers in China? Watch as the country’s most respected dance schools come together to compete in classic dance, ballet, modern dance, and more!
Dance With Me is becoming somewhat of an institution in spotting budding talent from all over China. The event gathers the nation’s top young amateur dancers and offers them the opportunity to showcase their talents. Looking at them, however, you would hardly think they were amateurs from all walks of life. Their passion and vigor is as strong as that of any professional dancer.
With dazzling rehearsed performances sprinkled with on-the-spot imitations, improvisation routines and audience input, this show is sure to give off some good vibrations!”
There were many aspects of the show that I thought made it far superior (in terms of showcasing pure dance talent, and staying true to each dance form) to SYTYCD. For one thing, the dancers come as they are… prepared to do a piece that they have created and rehearsed (both individuals and whole groups of dancers compete as distinct units, and only within their dance genre). Once they are done performing, the dancer (or a dancer elected out of the group of dancers by the dancers themselves) is given a trivia question, which is based on something that a dancer in their category should know. Then that dancer is given a source of inspiration (babies first steps, for instance), is given a random piece of music (which they hear a short clip of), and then has to improvise to a few minutes of that music. Very hard, but really interesting and definitely a good challenge for the dancers (who are all impeccably trained).
Each dance genre had it’s own large panel of judges, who were all introduced (very quickly), but were mainly there to give a score (like a skating competition). There was an opportunity at the end of each segment for one judge (maybe there was a main judge out of each group), to give a verbal opinion to the dancer, with some suggestions on how it could have been better. But it was somehow different. Perhaps it seemed less forced than on the American show. (Although to be fair, intonation was lost on me, as I do not speak Chinese, and had to read the translated subtitles instead.)
Another difference is the amount of time each dancer or dance group was given. Some of the pieces must have been at least 15 minutes long. There was no trying to condense every impressive step in their repertoire into a few minutes. They had the time to do exactly what they wanted, just as they would if they were giving a performance in a traditional theater (although with the addition of some flashy lights and camera angles of course).
In the end, I don’t know if the format of “Dance With Me” would be able to hold the attention of a US tv audience as well as SYTYCD has, but it’s interesting to see the approach to tv dance competition by different cultures. Perhaps this is the dance-o-mane’s version of SYTYCD? EIther way, they are both on to something.
I really think that dance on tv in general is a good thing, as long as people understand that it is an altogether different beast than the live performances you would see in a theater, a ballroom, etc. With SYTYCD, they are taking a format that the US tv audience is familar and comfortable with - American Idol - and injecting it with an art form that may be a bit less familiar to most people, and that you usually don’t see much of on tv. No, it’s not a pure representation of each dance genre that is shown (I can’t imagine that people tuning in are expecting to see that, it is a Fox television show after all), but it’s an introduction. I get excited about the fact that there could be a little girl or boy out there, who doesn’t see much pro dancing around him or her, but sees this on tv, and it creates that spark. Who knows where that spark will take them, but it is really something.
And if all this attention were also to spark dance companies to come up with new creative ways to put themselves out there and raise awareness, great! But I think they shouldn’t forget why they are doing it, and remember to stay true to their own style, aesthetic, and purpose.
You can find showtimes for Dance With Me here.
Lincoln Center Face-Lift
I was passing by 65th Street (between Broadway & Amsterdam) and I noticed this drastic change and proof of production towards the Lincoln Center renovations. They replaced a concrete wall with a pleasant glass entry-way to the Juilliard Theatre. Shnazzy!
MGDC at Joyce Theater
This is our long awaited NY season and it is already in the second week.
We rented Duke Studio on 42nd street to rehearse for it. Otherwise we could not use our own set peice for rehearsals. MGDC used to have a 3 story building on 63rd and 2nd Ave. That’s where Martha used to create ballets and she filmed her “Dancer’s World” when we reherase and take classes there. It was magical that you see so many art pieces around you. So this time at the Duke, reminded us of how nice it was to have those set pieces around.
and now at the Joyce, we are using them all. but there is not much space so they are in the air.
More to come…
Dancers slow down Los Angeles
Hurrah!! “Slow Dancing” has at last made its way (from New York) to Los Angeles. Especially after reading Matt’s first ever blog interview with David Michalek, I’ve been anxiously counting down the months, weeks and days until the screens completed their 3,000-mile trek closer to moi. (Pardon the excessive drama; we’ll blame the late hour, shall we?)
All drama aside, though, the exhibit is truly amazing and breathtakingly beautiful. The Los Angeles display is structured slightly differently than it had been in New York; we’ve two less screens that don’t hang from the theaters’ facades but that, together, encompass the fountains sitting in the center of the Music Center. Especially after (and, even, as!) the sun goes down, the spectacle is truly a sight to behold.
Janie Taylor stops a passing crowd.
Probably what surprised me most was the (intentionally?) clever juxtaposition of the images. At one point, Wendy Whelan and Omayra Amaya moved through a port de bras so similar and so in synch with each other that it seemed as though they had choreographed the segment.
Big screen role model? A passerby apparently thought so.
I might be alone in thinking this–it certainly wouldn’t be the first time!–but I found it oddly discomforting and strangely, well, weird to see dancers magnified on such monstrous screens. I’m a little old-fashioned, I suppose: I love that dance, traditionally at least, and its beauty relies solely on the size of the dancer’s movement (and not on the dancer’s (generally smaller) size or build) and on the power of projecting of such movement (and not on the power of projection tools), to deepen and/or strengthen the impact of his/her performance.
Desmond: He’s ready to take over Los Angeles. 
Until the 26th, you know where I’ll be!
“Slow Dancing” Interview
Tonight when I came to check out the site, I saw Susan’s post about viewing David Michalek’s “Slow Dancing” film installation in Los Angeles. While it’s certainly a different setup than what we had in New York, I still want to urge everyone to go check it out. It’s an incredibly unique experience and I was lucky enough to conduct an interview with Michalek himself for my site back in July. Thought this was the perfect opportunity to share it with some new readers. It’s up at the Music Center of Los Angeles until the 26th of September. Enjoy!
Rounding the corner by Avery Fisher Hall as you approach the plaza at Lincoln Center has been known to take people’s breath away. The plaza itself is such a New York City landmark with the incredible history housed within the three theaters that surround the fountain, and at night it remains one of the most beautiful New York locations. Yet what is happening right now at Lincoln Center is sure to take your breath away like never before. In years past, the salsa bands have beckoned dancers to strut their stuff under the clear summer skies, but as you approach Lincoln Center as it is now, you will see dancers of a size and speed you might never have imagined.
David Michalek’s brilliant “Slow Dancing” film installation towers over the plaza on three 50-foot high screens covering the face of the State Theater. Each screen hosts one dancer at a time who goes through a 5-second movement pattern that Michalek has stretched out to a length of roughly 10 minutes using state of the art high definition video equipment. There may be hundreds of dancers samba-ing on the plaza below but it is these projections that will keep your attention.
After reading several articles about Michalek’s work I was anxious to head up to Lincoln Center to view some of the 43 dancers captured by his camera. It was with eager eyes that I got off the subway a few weeks ago and braved the crowd for a chance to see some of the world’s finest dancers from almost every discipline imaginable. The dance community is a notoriously small world, and between Michalek and his wife, New York City Ballet principal dancer Wendy Whelan, they were able to gather the diverse group used for the project with only one to two degrees of separation. Michalek grew up watching dance and was a fan during his schooling at UCLA but it wasn’t until his marriage to Whelan that he became fully immersed in the dance world. On my second visit I worked up the courage to approach Whelan, who I have admired immensely in the years I’ve watched her at City Ballet, and Michalek who I noticed standing on the side of the crowd. They were both incredibly kind and Michalek was nice enough to do a phone interview with me.
“I really like something about every single one of them,” Michalek admits of his subjects. “Some of them are less easy to watch in that there’s not a kind of virtuosic movement, the Asian disciplines working with small hand gestures and limited movement, which requires more patience. Even those have extraordinary moments.”
While one screen may be projecting a traditional Japanese dancer, the screen next to it will contain someone like Dana Caspersen (The Forsythe Company), Herman Cornejo (ABT), or Janie Taylor (NYCB) who stretch out every limb in a constant barrage of (slow) movement. Each night the projections are displayed randomly and the combinations seem almost endless. Part of what I enjoyed so much was being able to take one screen at a time or view the interaction between the three screens. Even though they were created separately in their 10X10 foot space, they take on a new life together.
Even Michalek, who is more familiar with each projection than anyone else, admits his fascination. “It’s still a very exciting show night to night,” he says. “Even for me the fact that we start the play heads in different positions makes it a randomized effect with juxtapositions that happen on any given night that are new and exciting.”
The juxtapositions are just one of the many things I found fascinating about “Slow Dancing.” The first time I arrived I was overwhelmed by the amount of people in the plaza for “Midsummer Night’s Swing,” although it was exciting to see them shaking their hips only to slow down one minute as the images on screen above them caught their attention. How often does dance attract such a diverse crowd as this? Of course for something as stark and beautiful as Michalek’s images, sometimes I found the Samba dancing distracting. “In all honesty,” he confesses, “from a visual standpoint I at times wished that the Midsummer Set hadn’t been there. From a conceptual standpoint I appreciated the juxtaposition. If we hear a statistic that only 8 percent of the United States will see a live performance in their lifetime, while that might be true and it might suggest a lack of interest in dance, it doesn’t relate to social dancing, which is alive and well.” Even if just one of the social dancers was moved enough to stop and take notice of the ghost like dancers looming above, it’s worth it…and I assure you many people were stopping to take notice.
The images evoke a sense of wonder and it’s no surprise as dance is rarely seen like this. Dance is usually an interactive process between the music, the dancer and the audience but dance on film is notoriously difficult. Taking it a step further, Michalek uses silent images of the world’s greatest dancers to stunning effect. The crowd becomes the music and it changes every night. I become afraid when watching a video of myself dancing at regular speed, I might go into a coma were I to see it slow down to 1000 frames per second. It seems as I am not the only one, as Michalek admitted that the dancers were “more or less freaked out when they saw it the first time.”
The creation of this installation was a very interactive process that took almost a year to come to its present state. Of course there was much planning before that even if it was just in his head. “It was an idea that I had been carrying around for a long time. For something on this scale to arise, you need the financial support, the institutional support and the cultural support on many levels.” Fortunately, he got it.
Filming was done during November, December, January and March in four day cycles each of those months. Even though the film used for each dancer was barely over 5-seconds long, it took roughly three hours per dancer to get the desired result. “The dancers and myself could see the footage,” he remarks of the time filming. “I could put in my two cents about how things might be able to be improved slightly by turning things on an angle.”
Needless to say, the dancers put a lot of trust in this talented artist and his project. When I was talking with Michalek it became obvious what a labor of love this was to him. “It felt the project had really good karma from the start,” he says. “Some projects are struggles, but if you’re going to work in this way and take on the responsibilities of the project life you have to think of it as a small business. It’s incredibly complex in the sense that I start of with a flow chart. There are so many people to get involved and it’s a difficult process of finding the right things. With this project, I really felt the flow from the beginning. ”
My second viewing of “Slow Dancing,” was on a perfect summer night last Sunday. Joined by friends and fellow bloggers, I was again fascinated by each of the dancers and their moment in the spotlight. Without the sound of the big band of “Midsummer,” it felt more than ever like a meditation on the creation of movement. The subjects are surrounded by darkness and often you can’t tell where the floor is. The only time that this bothered me was with tap dancer Roxanne Butterfly because of tap dancing’s requirement of the floor. Oddly enough I didn’t miss the sound, but I would like to have seen what she was in contact with.
Michalek had little to do with what movement was executed, he simply requested that they practice in a 10X10 space and realized that even the five seconds could have some framing. “We experimented and found that the films that had the most trajectory of something happening had a beginning middle and end, which became more interesting.” But even within the confines of filming what is essentially a live art, nothing ever seems stifled by its place behind a lens. Instead he captures the essence of his subjects, something he aims for as a portrait artist.
So what does the future hold for Michalek and “Slow Dancing”? He tells me he looks forward to working with dancers again, which should be welcome news to the dance community that needs all the exposure it can get. “Slow Dancing” itself will have more exposure as Michalek hopes to tour it around the country. It will undoubtedly play differently in different spaces, and when asked whether he was intent on it staying as public art, Michalek notes, “I would really like to take it around and I think when I can show it in public I will, however I don’t want to limit the viewing possibilities by enforcing any parameters on it. If a small Midwestern gallery wants to show it, that would be great. Different, but great.”
Sometimes it is the different things that end up becoming great, which is exactly how I felt leaving my second viewing of the film. Go check out this unique experience in it’s first stop away from New York! Now through September 26th only. Who knows when you will see something like this again.
Ghostly lights
Here in (way too) sunny California, said sun is only now on its way to bed. (Can you sense my impatience?) The slow dancing images look faint and ghostly as all of us wait for the (natural) light to fade.
I can’t wait to see them in full!
Ballet de Santiago in Swan Lake
Thanks for your comments, I hope you enjoy these Swan Lake pictures.
The principal dancers are Marcela Goicoechea and Luis Ortigoza.
LVHRD’s DNCHRD III
DNCHRD III
You may remember me talking about Doug’s semi-secret creative members club LVHRD (pronouced LIVE HARD) before. It’s the one where they throw events where architects battle to create models live on stage, fashion designers compete to create the best dress in an hour, and for the past two years, individuals have battled for the title of Dance Champion.
The first year of LVHRD’s DNCHRD (pronounced DANCE HARD) featured the wonderful Mr. David Hallberg as a judge. Last year, both Gia and I had the opportunity to see and comment on the competition from a front-row judge’s seat as well. This year, the format is entirely different….
According to LVRHD’s website…
“Three DJ’s go head to head in a round robin tournament where you provide the vynl. Awards for best dance crew will be up for grabs, so bring your favorite record and be ready to dance your ass off.”
The main event is on Tuesday SEPT. 25TH (also Doug’s bday), but TONIGHT at an East Village bar called B-Side, there wil be a Pre-Party, where you can meet the competing DJ’s. Also, if you bring some vintage vinyl tonight to the official Pre-Party, you will be granted free admission to the main event on the 25th.
I’ll be there tonight, and next Tuesday.
I’ve already got my vinyl - Doug E Fresh - in honor of you know who.
Miami
So I just returned from a fun 5-day visit to Miami. I went to visit a bunch of very close friends of mine, who are now prominent members of the Miami City Ballet.
My first order of business upon my arrival was to really take in South Beach (where most of the dancers down there reside). At first it gave off a feeling of surrealism. It was as if I had walked into a postcard setting. Or as if the city of Miami Beach is simply one great big extensive resort in paradise. There are miles and miles of beaches engulfing South Beach, and the weather is in a constant tropical state. I’m not sure how I would feel about living in such a peculiar corner of the country, but visiting it was, beyond a doubt, an experience of its own.
Visiting my friends gave me a prime opportunity to get to see what Miami City Ballet is all about. Like with any ballet company, it has its pluses and minuses. However, overall I found that I really took a liking to the company. It seems like a great company to work for. There are roughly 50 dancers, and they appear to have created a sort of family-based feeling to the work environment. The company is saturated with talented dancers from all walks of life. Everything from Cuban virtuosos, to Chinese technicians, to talented alums of the School of American Ballet.
I also loved their repertoire, and remain to be particularly jealous of the Twyla Tharp ballets that they get to dance (In the Upper Room, 9 Sinatra Songs, + more). Sometimes I find that, after a while, Tharp choreography can begin to mesh and look very similar. But it’s the type of movement that I could watch all day. Its like candy to me. Or ice cream. In ballet slippers.
One thing I couldn’t help but noticing was the average height of the Miami dancers. Their tallest dancer can’t be more then 5’11”, thus making me feel like some sort of colossal freak. I constantly caught myself crouching over when I talked to the other dancers, out of self-consciousness regarding my height and size :-P.
So I definitely had a great time on my 5-day stint. I will absolutely be back to visit again very soon.
South Beach! A few of my close friends being sandwiched between two Winger correspondents
One of MCB’s beautiful practice studios. The company is in the middle of rehearsing “In The Upper Room” here
Me with a big group of the MCB dancers
Fellow Winger correspondant Alex Wong, doing the ‘rubies tilt’ with MCB dancer Daniel Baker
Ballet de Santiago in Manon
Hi, last year we did this great ballet, MANON. Like always when I´m not on the stage I am with my camera.
I hope you enjoy these pictures, the principal dancers are Marcela Goicoechea, Alessandra Ferri, Luis Ortigoza and Julio Bocca. They were sharing the performances, and also this was the last time Alessandra and Julio danced together.
