Double-decker tour buses are hardly a novel sight in Manhattan, but if you bedazzle the bus with sequins and glittering streamers and load it up with a rowdy, pajama-clad brass band, even the most jaded New Yorker will stop and look. We know because we were there, squeezed in among rowdy musicians atop a bedazzled bus that wound its way through the city streets on Friday afternoon. The traveling performance was part of an effort to drum up publicity and support for a public art installation that two artists want to bring to Central Park. Nope, it’s not The Gates Part II. It’s a miniature floating city called Chili Moon Town.
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If you fast-forward through commercials, you might be missing out on some of the best dancing on television. In an effort to capitalize on our current obsession with all things dance, companies like Ikea, Nike, T-Mobile, and Ford have been making spectacular use of choreography in recent years – and we think this is an excellent excuse to create a list of some of our favorites. Read More »
Yanni will always have the Acropolis, the Taj Mahal and Beijing’s Forbidden City. But when it comes to performing in the shadow of major historic landmarks, Brooklyn’s own David Fishel has the New Age pianist beat by a long shot. In the past two years, Fishel has danced at more than 50 sites across Europe and the United States, with landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, the Golden Gate Bridge and Times Square providing the backdrop to his performances. He films all of his dances and posts them on a site called Davey Dance Blog. Read More »
The Unsightful Nanny by Jonathan Riedel; photo by Julie Lemberger
Navigating the New York International Fringe Festival is notoriously overwhelming — unless you’re looking for dance performances. Of the roughly 200 shows at this year’s festival, only six fall under the heading of dance (we’ve excluded musicals, which may contain dancing or some approximation thereof, as well as a one-woman show about a dance therapist). While it would be nice to see dance better represented at the Fringe, the upside is that the process of choosing what to see won’t make your head explode. Heck, you can even see all six!*
Here, we make the process even easier with our handy guide.
*Convenience bonus: All dance performances take place at the Robert Moss Theater. Read More »
Choreographer Jason Gilkison says that Burn the Floor, the ballroom extravaganza that opens on Broadway this Sunday, is his grandfather’s legacy. It’s a bittersweet story: Sam Gilkison opened Australia’s first ballroom dance school in 1931, and young Jason grew up to be a world champion Latin and ballroom dancer. But the elder Gilkison didn’t live to realize his dream of popularizing ballroom among the general public. When he died 12 years ago, the dance form was considered irrelevant and hopelessly out of date. Read More »
TAKE Dance Company in Footsteps in the Snow; photo by Mary Ann Moy
On a recent afternoon at the Ailey Studios, choreographer Takehiro Ueyama watched his company do a run-through of Linked, a joyful, high-energy ensemble piece set to music by Pat Metheny. TAKE Dance Company was preparing for its season at Dance Theater Workshop, which takes place through Sunday.
“I don’t usually do dances like this anymore,” he said afterward as the dancers sprawled on the floor, catching their breath. Darker material is more his style, he continued, plus he had gotten tired of hearing critics compare his upbeat pieces to those of Paul Taylor.
Perhaps one can forgive the critics a little — after all, Ueyama was a member of Paul Taylor Dance Company for eight years, from 1995 to 2003. And now, with TAKE in its fifth year, Ueyama no longer worries about being branded a Taylor acolyte. He’s enjoying the process of finding his own voice as a choreographer, even though it’s a gig he was initially reluctant to accept. Read More »
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One of the best things about site-specific dance is watching spectators’ faces morph from expressions of dumbfounded confusion to delight. This was certainly the case last Thursday at the Seaport, when the usual crowd of tourists and business people on their lunch break unexpectedly found themselves in the midst of Nicholas Leichter Dance’s “Space Funk Invasion.” Read More »
As the dance world reflects on the passing of one of its legends, we caught up with Village Voice dance critic Deborah Jowitt to get her thoughts on Merce Cunningham’s vast contributions to the art form, both as a choreographer and a dancer. “He had a tremendous air of animal alertness, a kind of inner fire,” Jowitt told us. “He didn’t mug, he didn’t emote. He had this blazing quality.”
From configuring choreography based on a roll of the dice to insisting that music and dance exist independently of one another, Cunningham revolutionized traditional ideas about what dance is and how it should look. Here, Jowitt talks about some of the defining characteristics of his work and recalls the first time she saw the company. Read More »
Pilobolus has come a long way in the nearly 40 years since its humble beginnings in a college modern dance class. Founded by four guys with no prior dance experience, and named for a spore-shooting fungus that thrives in manure, Pilobolus is perhaps the most popular dance company performing today.
The Connecticut-based troupe, known for its shape-shifting human sculptures and daring acrobatics, regularly sells out performances around the world — its current run at the Joyce Theater included. And in the past decade or so, Pilobolus has expanded its reach beyond the concert stage, appearing in television commercials for companies like Mobil, Hyundai and Bloomingdales, a Marilyn Manson video, and the 2007 Academy Awards ceremony. Read More »
You’ve gotten the official Flavorpill recommendation; now meet the man behind The Double Life Is Twice As Good, a collection of fiction and nonfiction that covers territory ranging from corduroy appreciation to female ejaculation and everything in between. We are referring, of course, to Jonathan Ames, a New York writer, performance artist and occasional amateur boxer whose fierce and hilarious writing has made him a cult superstar over the past decade. Now, with two of his novels adapted for the big screen and an upcoming HBO series based on his short story “Bored to Death,” Ames seems poised to make the leap to more mainstream superstardom. Read More »
