This is one of the posters starting appear around the city (this one at 5th Ave N/R/W train stop). This is a great event at City Center (all tickets $10!!!) The shows are in Sept. Everything from Shen Wei, ABT, Cunningham, to Oregon Ballet Theater and much much more. A great mix, the right price, and a SUPERB venue. One of these days, we hope SYREN will get on the bill! In the meantime, we are enthusiastic supporters.
Well, the company is hard at work creating a new piece that is set to the “Pelleas et Melisande” suite by Sebelius. We have just two weeks before it premieres! It will be the first time SYREN has worked with live musicians, so we are thrilled and a bit nervous at the same time.
The company has never worked so fast, with only four weeks to get the piece done. Our heads are spinning in 12’s and 3’s, but we are really getting somewhere, and I think that after Thursday’s rehearsal we will have a solid dent in the beast!
Check out what Lynn and Lindsay were rockin with today…
I was planning on making my first post an interview of the choreographer Anna Sperber. I have the interview, but she never approved that I could put it online so I never went ahead with it. Too bad, because her answers were pretty interesting.
I attended two classes at the Movement Research Festival, one with Ann Liv Young and another with Eleanor Houlihan. I performed in one of the festival’s performances, “Populous,” curated by AUNTS (aka. Jbird/Jamm/Jean Marie Leary). More on all the MR Festival activity soon. You can become a member of the MR forum here and read the discussions surrounding this year’s MR festival:
http://movementresearch.org/publishing/forum/
AUNTS/Jbird Leary hosts Alligator Mondays
“at 8pm, ALL MONDAYS, but really no one comes until 9pm and we go until 11 or midnight or whenever. anyone, bring anyone… Alligator Monday was started April 2, 2007 to talk about dance, drink beer and eat pizza. you get a free wood oven personal pizza with every drink. Alligator Lounge, 600 Metropolitan @ Lorimer Williamsburg, Brooklyn G to Metropolitian L to Lorimer http://www.alligatorlounge.com/”
(from the the Alligator Mondays forum post on the MR forum)
This week (starting tomorrow) I’ll be attending Helen Pickett’s Forsythe workshop. More on that soon!
This past Sunday the Sarah Lawrence dance department participated in College Showcase: Works by Tharp, at the Joyce. The project brought together dancers from five New York colleges to perform works by Twyla Tharp. The picture above was taken during the Sarah Lawrence tech rehearsal using a slow exposure to capture the movement.
Barnard College, Eight Jelly Rolls (Jelly Roll Morton) Hunter College, Country Dances - Excerpt (Traditional American) The Julliard School, Deuce Coupe - Excerpt (The Beach Boys) Marymount Manhattan College, The Fugue Sarah Lawrence College, The Fugue (lecture demonstration)
This was a fun project to be a part of. Read the New York Times review here. Sarah Richison and I presented a video from a computational project we had been working on. I describe this project in a previous post. The video was shown in the lobby as the audience entered. It looked good on their fancy HD screen and I was happy that Sarah and I had re-shot all the footage to make everything look as crisp and clean as possible. Unfortunately I didn’t post about my showing beforehand since it was unclear, up until the last minute, whether we would be able to show the work. Intellectual property issues clouded things and the work had to be renamed Dancing Markov Networks. I didn’t mind the change however since it gave a more scientific description of what the project actually was.
Earlier in the week Sarah and I had the pleasure of presenting our project at the Joyce Soho during the last part of a Dance Talks presentation by noted dance historian and critic Marcia Siegal. Talking with Marcia Siegal was an honor and a pleasure. She is an incredibly accomplish writer, academic and thinker in the field of dance and dance studies. We were a bit star struck. Sarah even brought one of her books for Marcia to sign. It was great to talk about our work with such an engaged audience. I definitely hope to keep in touch with Marcia Siegel in the future. She had a great enthusiasm for exploring ideas about dance through computational methods. It always feels good when people take genuine interest in your work.
John Jasperse is a name you should know: his cerebral dances, acclaimed in New York and throughout Europe (William Forsythe is a fan) transformed contemporary dance beginning with 1995’s Excessories. He returns to Dance Theater Workshop this week with a trio, Becky, Jodi and John, featuring himself and two of downtown dance’s most riveting performers: Becky Hilton and Jodi Melnick. I recommend this for the opportunity to witness extremely high-quality performers. There’s live music by Hawn Rowe (he’s a genius). But the main reason is that this dance is about dancers (the three met in New York in the mid-’80s). There’s nudity, but it’s not like Ann Liv. I won’t say anything else. Just go.
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