Archive for Repertory
April 4, 2008 at 12:04 pm · Filed under dance, training, Repertory, research, improvisation, DEBORAH, Yasmeen Godder
Yasmeen Godder’s studio
It’s been more than seven months since I have learned new repertory, and while I’m loving my dance classes and improvisational projects, I do miss the process of absorbing and living in a piece of choreography. So even though my body feels a bit tired now, my spirit is extremely happy after tasting a bit of Yasmeen Godder’s work! I just finished a five-day workshop at her studio in Jaffa (at the south of Tel Aviv - technically, the city is Tel Aviv-Yafo). Yasmeen is currently on tour in Europe with her production Sudden Birds, so two of her dancers led the intensive. Each day began with Eran Shanny’s technique class, which was very similar to Yasmeen’s with its influences of release technique, yoga, Feldenkrais, and more. After he helped us absorb the principles of Yasmeen’s movement style, Iris Erez took over for the repertory segment of the workshop. We did improvisational exercises like those Yasmeen uses in her creative process, and we learned solo and duet material from Two Playful Pink. Yasmeen’s choreography is meaty, both in its movement vocabulary and its emotional content, and Two Playful Pink – a piece originally performed in 2003 by Yasmeen and Iris – is no exception. The dance concerns attitudes towards femininity and the body, and the movement often shifts a conventional expression of sexuality into more unfamiliar (or unaccepted?) territory: a hand seductively placed on the upper thigh soon insistently clutches the crotch; the slow fixing of messy hair is paired with a sudden spank-like slap to the hip; a smile is distorted by tucking in the upper lip or tugging the cheek into a sneer.
There’s so much I could say about what I gained through this experience – in fact, my stream of consciousness free-write in my notes file was enough to make Word send me a few error messages last night – but I’ll try to keep my post here manageable . . . If you haven’t noticed yet, I tend to be a bit wordy!
I’ve found myself explaining recently that yes, I am both a dancer and a researcher, so I’ll write a bit about how these two activities are complementary. Quite wonderfully, this workshop reinforced my belief in the value of physical research. My experience in technique classes this year has provided me with important information about the physicality used in Israeli contemporary dance. Yet with repertory, there’s another level of experience and analysis to be found; instead of simply dealing with the raw material of technique – some of the building blocks of a finished dance – learning choreography allows me to explore issues of composition and content along with the movement itself. This week I got a physical sense of Yasmeen’s partnering work, which epitomizes an intricate, aggressive style employed by many young Israeli choreographers. Actually attempting to dance excerpts of this duet gave me a deeper appreciation of what I had admired from afar because I myself got to experience (or, well, try to experience) the speed, precision, and trust involved in this kind of partnering. I was also reminded that in the hands of the right choreographer (and ultimately in the bodies of the right dancers), movement can be wonderfully loaded with meaning. In the duet excerpts from Two Playful Pink, each tug, shove, jerk, drop, fall, and look is a challenge from one woman to the other, a chance to manipulate, dominate, taunt, display . . .
Learning repertory also provides an extraordinary opportunity for me to recognize and question the assumptions I make as a spectator of choreography. As I realized this week, what you perceive when you are an audience member does not always get at the truth of the matter from the performer’s perspective. What I often see in Israeli contemporary dance is power – but it’s not always a controlled power or a power composed of force. In my experience with Yasmeen’s choreography (and specifically thanks to the feedback Iris gave me), I understood that this power is at times a matter of energy unleashed by giving into momentum and gravity. Having trained primarily in ballet and older modern dance forms such as Cunningham technique and Graham, Taylor, and Limón-influenced styles, I find working in this released-influenced mode quite challenging – but also quite necessary for my growth as a dancer. You can bet I’ll be back in Yasmeen’s classes after she returns from her tour!
Here’s a link to information about Two Playful Pink on Yasmeen Godder’s website.
Recent Posts by deborah friedes
November 28, 2007 at 2:29 pm · Filed under ballet, dance, tour, travel, architecture, projects, DAVID, american ballet theater, Repertory, cities, architects, opera houses, david hallberg, traveling, companies, process, san francsico, benjamin millepied, giselle, american balet theatre
As the City Center season winded down and ABT went on a week tour to Berkeley, CA, bringing some of the rep. that we did in NYC, the dancers then embarked on a four week lay off. My travels brought me all over the country, and then to Europe for a week of preparations for an upcoming debut.
The week in Berkeley was filled not only with performing repetoire that I enjoy very much, Ballo Della Regina and Benjamin Millepied’s From Here on Out, but also all the advantages that Northern California can bring. I had a wonderful meal at Chez Panisse, hailed as one of the best restaurants in the country, and soaked up some great art, the photography especially interesting, at San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA).
Outside my house, Camelback Mountain
With the tour finished and with the reason that I don’t get home to Phoenix as often as I would like, I spent a quick 48 hours being pampered by the ‘rents’ as only ‘rents’ could do. But most importantly, seeing my BEAUTIFUL GOLDENS, as I have shared with you in past enteries.
On to Minneapolis, where I spent another 48 hours gawking at the architecturally stunning Walker Art Center, newly redone by Herzog and De Meuron, the same architects that completed the refurbishment of the De Young Museum in San Fran, as Sloan pointed out on a recent visit. I had a much anticipated meeting with a very well respected artist that might possibly turn into a future project. We shall see…
The Opera House in Amsterdam
I only stopped over in New York, to do a little laundry and re pack my bags, to go onto Amsterdam for a week. Guillaume Graffin, a former Paris Opera trained and 17 year principal/ballet master with ABT, moved to Amsterdam 2 years ago and joined the Dutch National Ballet as ballet master. When he was working over at ABT, we formed a certain bond in the studio… he having coached me in my first full length ballet with the company, Swan Lake. I have always wanted to go over there and work with him, continuing my desire to learn from him as an artist, and I finally had the free time to do so. I am going to debut Giselle in the spring, with none other than Stella Abrera, GORGEOUS dancer with the company, dancing the lead. One of Guillaume’s great roles was Albrecht in Giselle, and I found the opportunity of him passing on his expertise to a fresh Albrecht something that I couldn’t pass up.
Guillaume in Giselle
The week was an intense one, mainly just talking about the character of Albrecht, and dissecting what to portray through out the story. Guillaume is such an intuitive artist, that I can only try and absorb what he tells me ‘he did’ or chose ‘not to do’ when he was dancing the role. It will take much more preparation for the actual debut but it was really nice to break the ice with someone I respect so much.
And that leads me here… back home, working on more preparations for the Met Season, and at my computer, finally with internet service and The WInger.
Recent Posts by david hallberg
January 21, 2007 at 4:06 pm · Filed under backstage, ballet, rehearsal, rehearsals, dancers, architecture, video, art, podcast, Repertory, EVAN MCKIE, the stuttgart Ballet, dancing, architects, event, wingers
cliquez ici 
Hello WINGERs……………..
I must tell you about my fascinating trip to Paris.
Brigitte Lefevre, the ‘directrice de la danse’ at The Paris Opera invited the Stuttgart Ballet to open the theater’s incredible 2007 season with our immensely popular, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ (Shakespeare, Cranko, Stolze/Scarlatti.) So even though we had a mere few days between Christmas and New Years to rehearse this (rather big) ballet, we were off to Paris! I have been to Paris to see ballet before (Stuttgart to Paris is less than an hour flight) and am quite close with some members of the company, but the idea of actually dancing on the fabulous (raked) stage of the historical Opera Garnier seemed like a distant dream… Well, it turned out that I would be dancing 5 of the 6 performances and suddenly being there was an actual reality!
‘’Taming'’, as we call it, has two main couples. The story revolves around the boisterous Petruccio’s comical dialogue with Katerina(The shrew, who is seen in an angry (typical for her) rage because her beautiful and sought-after sister, Bianca, is entertaining THREE suitors. ) The three suitors are the foolish ‘Gremio’, the flamboyant ‘Hortensio’ and the poetically lovesick ‘Lucentio’. Bianca is touched by Lucentio and the two become a couple. Anyone who knows the story, knows how these two main couples serve as foils for the other. Lucentio and Bianca are extremely idealistic about there love whereas it is Petruccio and Kate’s honest eccentricities that ultimately create a meaningful relationship. That means that the choreography that John Cranko chose to represent these traits has Bianca and Lucentio dancing very pretty and precise classical ballet steps throughout whereas Petruccio and Kate do explosively powerful (and often hilarious) movements.
I danced Lucentio (the poetic prince-like suitor) and Hortensio (an outrageous and self-absorbed suitor who has a variation where he almost kills Bianca in an attempt to impress her with his ’supreme’ expertise on the mandolin.) I get a kick out of dancing these two roles back to back as they are in most of the same scenes but have very contrasting personalities. Lucentio is a very technical role with lots of batterie , pirouttes, and partnering…(In the second act Carnival scene, he must perform an immensely quick variation which leads directly into a long love pas de Deux with Bianca, full of Cranko lifts and off balance promennades. The audience doesn’t notice the effort that goes into making the steps appear as smooth as possible but good endurance is required ..) As for Hortensio, he must always be ridiculously flamboyant and the role requires a lot of improvisational acting and timing = major fun!
As we were all relatively busy performing or rehearsing (there were a few important debuts and also the need to adapt to the raked-forward stage which makes pirouttes and lifts quite a challenge at first…), most of our Parisien sight-seeing took place within the walls of the Garnier. I had a couple of minutes where I thought I would take some cell-phone-footage of what such a beautiful theatre looks like from the ‘Wings'’ so to speak. I recommend going for yourselves to watch anything from the awesome line-up and also to witness the beauty of the foyer and auditorium, if you haven’t already. This clip is more of a WINGER exclusive 
compiled simply of images of what the Opera House looks like from another angle……
I had a truly amazing time in France and tried to give my best performance in a hysterical ballet at a very historical venue.
Love ’til next time
-Evan
(click on the Opera Garnier image at the top to view footage)
The Stuttgart Ballet
L’Opera de Paris
a note on Cranko’s ‘’Taming of the Shrew'’
Recent Posts by Evan McKie
October 25, 2006 at 12:15 am · Filed under backstage, ballet, choreographers, dancers, DAVID, american ballet theater, Repertory, tharp
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| Posted by David
Gillain Murphy and I have a competition going…. More like a feud… Somewhat like the Capulets and the Montagues.
We are pictured here, about to go on stage for Twyla Tharp’s ‘In the Upper Room’. She is what we call a ’stomper’, I am what we call a ‘ballet dancer’. There are 12 dancers in the ballet, a marathon more like, and 6 are stompers and 6 are ballet dancers. The stompers wear tennis shoes and have VERY athletic movement, while the ballet dancers are in ballet shoes turning, jumping, things we’ve trained for.
Gillian and I have a movement together where it seems like we are competing. Dancing to show who is better, the stomper girl or the ballet boy.. Well, its all a matter of opinion but all is fair in the world of the stage… or is it?
To be continued….
Recent Posts by david hallberg
August 26, 2006 at 3:30 pm · Filed under dance, choreographers, dance event, dancers, DAVID, composers, Repertory
| | Posted by David
Now that the Vineyard has officially passed, I thought I would share some photos I took of the performance on Thursday night. This ‘photo montage’ is of a piece that a group of the dancers did called ‘Zin’ with choreography by Nils…
Here shows Marian Butler, Jeff Golladay, among others dancing the high energy piece. Philip Glass composed this piece of music (not the usual Glass you here) which seemed to be inspired by African/Brazilian samba. The work is very high impact and full of energy and non stop. True fun all around…
Get it Marian!!!!!
The end of the piece which ends in a moving circle, with the girls lifted off the ground.
Recent Posts by david hallberg
