Rachel’s blog @ View Rachel @ Juilliard Dance | Published: January 27, 2005 Category: reviewBy Rachel Straus Jacqulyn Buglisi’s new dance “The Conversation” rushes forward with a turbulent energy comparable to nature’s brute force. The choreographer’s 11-year-old company Buglisi Foreman Dance, which she co-directs with her husband Donlin Foreman, has always focused on producing works that seethe with physical foreboding. What comes as a surprise in Ms. Buglisi’s new […] Published: December 16, 2004 Category: reviewBy Rachel Straus Under a glowing sculpture, two arms shoot into space. A synthesized sound pulses as a dancer’s chest unfolds skyward. A woman’s long legs make quick flickering spirals. What transpires is visually stunning and necessarily experimental: the performing dancers are hearing the music for the first time. This is a tradition of the […] Published: December 6, 2004 Category: reviewBy Rachel Straus Known for electrifying stages worldwide, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater brought maximum voltage to City Center last Friday night with the company’s premiere of Donald Byrd’s “Burlesque.” In Mr. Byrd’s dance satire, eight Ailey dancers pose as vaudeville-era performers, shooting out from a line of chairs as though their limbs are […] Published: November 18, 2004 Category: reviewBy Rachel Straus In a white room the size of an airplane hangar, two men sit on a high table with their legs dangling several feet from the floor. One of the men tips his body and careens over the edge. Just before smacking his head against the ground, his friend, without glancing, snatches him […] Published: November 15, 2004 Category: reviewBy Rachel Straus Hip-hop hit Broadway cement over 30 years ago, but it didn’t make it inside one of its theaters – as entirely its own show – until now. In Rennie Harris’ Legends of Hip-Hop, the originators of popping, locking and electric boogaloo celebrate, with a cadre of younger acolytes, the moves that revolutionized […] Published: November 3, 2004 Category: profileBy Rachel Straus In a garage space at the eastern edge of Brooklyn, six adults dodge two swinging cement blocks. As the pigeons in the garage’s rafters stay put, the dancers below scatter like a flock of birds each time the flying slabs come their way. A dancer dives – under a 30-pound block that […] Published: October 21, 2004 Category: reviewBy Rachel Straus In the beginning – according to the Bangarra Dance Theatre of Australia – there was movement. In “Bush,” artistic director Stephen Page and associate director Frances Rings create a dancing earth. During the 90-minute entertainment, which had its American debut Tuesday night, 11 dancers undulated and slithered back in time, telling nine […] Published: October 4, 2004 Category: reviewBy Rachel Straus For an express indoctrination into the dance world no better festival exists than Fall for Dance. At City Center – formerly a Masonic meeting hall of the Ancient Order of the Nobles of Mystic Shrine – the new festival’s $10 ticket price wooed and converted while the six-night smorgasbord of 30-company performances […] Published: September 20, 2004 Category: reviewBy Rachel Straus For the bar crowd disposed toward Cosmopolitans and interested in a bit of naughty dancing, Joe’s Pub offers the novel cocktail experience of Dancemopolitan – a cabaret act that mixes cognac quality dancing, a dash of the physically lewd, and a lick of choreographic experimentation. On Saturday, Joe’s Pub closed Dancemopolitan’s 2004 […] Published: September 14, 2004 Category: reviewBy Rachel Straus Tap virtuoso Savion Glover moves loose as a shoestring to produce a razor-sharp sound. He sings bebop with his feet. And he considers himself a drummer more than a dancer, though he has won at age 31 more awards than any other tap dancer of his generation. Mr. Glover opened the sixth […] |