Culturebot
“DTW announced its 2010-2011 season and it is a doozy! “  Read the Post

The New York Times, Arts Briefly
“The lineup includes a collaboration between the German dance maker and performer Raimund Hoghe and Faustin Linyekula of Congo; new work by Richard Move, who will recreate a 1963 interview with Martha Graham; and the French choreographer Alain Buffard’s “Les Inconsolés,” a work set to Schubert and Throbbing Gristle.” Read the article

For Immediate Release

DANCE THEATER WORKSHOP
announces

THE 2010-2011 SEASON

September 8, 2010 - June 25, 2011

New York, NY, JULY 29, 2010 - Dance Theater Workshop, the preeminent U.S. based center for contemporary dance and performance, announces today the 2010 - 2011 season. Spanning ten months and supporting over 40 artists, this season from acclaimed Artistic Director, Carla Peterson, continues Dance Theater Workshop’s deep tradition of supporting artists at all stages of their careers, from all over the globe, and across the vast spectrum that is contemporary performance.

Leveraging over four and half decades of dedication to artistic exploration, innovation, and quality programming, Dance Theater Workshop’s 2010 - 2011 season includes anticipated premieres, venerable remounts, increased Studio Series creative residencies, platforms for artistic discourse, and Dance Theater Workshop debuts

“Our new season once again shines a bright light on an intergenerational array of imaginative and rigorous art makers, while bringing to our audiences some of the most provocative, beautiful, exciting, and revered dance and performance voices working today. Building upon a deep and decades-long commitment to nurturing artists, Dance Theater Workshop joins forces with these gifted artists, our audiences, and our strategic partners to reflect on, debate, and celebrate these varied expressions borne out of the cultural landscape of our time.” said Carla Peterson, Artistic Director. Read the rest of this entry »

In a recent blog article on the Dance Magazine website, Wendy Perron considers her frustrations toward younger choreographers who keep running blog entries during the developmental stages of their work. Ms. Perron stresses her concern that blogging one’s creative process ultimately hinders the quality of said process– influencing the way one creates a piece in thinking too much about how to describe it later on. She turns to a quote from Igor Stravinsky, hoping young artists understand the importance of “groping for what comes next.” It is the explaining of process that is found the most troublesome– there should be excavation and tunneling through a place where there is no explanation to comfort the forward creation of movement.

Trying to view this argument through the eyes of a young choreographer, it seems fair to address converse sides of her complaint. If one is not mistaken, this is an argument over the most beneficial usage of a personal blog forum.

To some degree one could argue that blogging represents a mask of insecurity— for an audience to experience every step of development with the artist allows room for premature encouragement; textual public support that one’s piece is moving in the so-called “right” direction. The constant availability of material, however, diminishes the air of mystery about a piece. The audience sees directly where you are coming from and is forced to dig through paragraphs about rehearsals that might not only sound like complaints, but might unconsciously make comments about the dancers and collaborators who are also involved. That being said, much depends on the depth of explanation an artist might go into during their blog entries. A detailed account of rehearsal practice, for example, lessens room for speculation and anticipation before a premiere. On opening night would you want to overhear an audience member say, “Oh this must but be the bit I read about on so-and-so’s blog last week. He/She is trying to iterate the feeling of….” Wouldn’t you much rather gather feedback and hear fresh thoughts in the lobby post-show?

On the other hand, the artistic process is a delicate and amorphous series of events. It is intriguing to learn about the basic roots of an artist’s work– inspirations, sets of drawings, and text or music that spurred the original ideas. In college many students are encouraged to share their processes with other dancers and advisers, keep journals and sketchbooks that map not only idea, but the physical movement. Why can’t a blog become that box of information? In the “real world” artists appreciate a blank space, in this case the wonderful infinity of the internet, to stream thoughts, store them away for later contemplation.

Ultimately, it seems that the surge of young choreographers who are using blogs to document their process is a representation of the future of forum. While it is easy to agree with Ms. Perron that it is smarter not to reveal too much too soon, it can also be said that young artists, unaccustomed to the harsh world of dance criticism, might want to skip the specualation and sustain a confident approach to their work throughout its development. A blog should not be a place to brag, boast, bad-mouth, or jeopardize. The way artists use blogs should focus on the methods of recording and sharing: feeding its followers clues and small previews of the showcase to come. One should absolutely keep in mind, however, Ms. Perron’s concern that the danger of internal exploration is at stake: artists should never rely on the feedback of others to determine how to create work. The blind discovery of your process is a valued step in the creation of form, and it is that step you can blog about when you feel confident you have reached it on your own.

You can find the full post by Wendy Perron here. Culturebot is talking about it, too.

As American as…

By Elizabeth Zimmer

In the middle of North America sits the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a world-class campus that pays admirable attention to dance, having produced some of the earliest pioneers in educational dance (including Margaret H’Doubler and Anna Halprin) and having recently hosted a three-week intensive that sent several pieces to mid-July’s World Dance Alliance Global Dance Event (the current president of the WDA, Jin-Wen Yu, is also the chair of the UW-M dance program). Four faculty members—two of Asian descent, one from the Caribbean, and one native Midwesterner— from the school’s dance department shared the final concert program during the WDA event, which included work by and for their colleagues and friends. Its title, C4, seemed to be twitter-speak for a chance to see dances by four choreographers, but in fact five dance makers were represented, six if you count Chris Walker’s collaborating performer.

Peggy Myo-Young Choy, a Korean-American woman who teaches dance and Asian-American Studies in Madison, offered two works that ran together without interruption, demarcated by a brief silence and a blackout. Her solo for herself was followed by her choreography for a young black dancer, Toni-Renee Johnson. Both pieces were costumed, by Jillian Maslow, in shades of yellow, red and green; in Yelllowwww Matriarch Choy wore a long yellow skirt with a red lining over green, and in split-toe slippers stood pugnaciously while avant-garde jazzy percussion and a reed instrument played. Her focus firmly on the audience, she performed what appeared to be t’ai chi postures, as a human voice chanted. She shed a bolero top and did a back bend, followed by more “push-hands” gestures, leading to the blackout.

When the lights came back up we found ourselves looking at Johnson in Boxher, sitting on a stool in the same upstage space recently vacated by Choy, wearing minimal athletic gear on her very buff body, plus sneakers. She performed a sort of funk dance (the music here melded Fred Ho with Michael Jackson), which included more pugnacious gestures. She seemed to mime dying as the piece drew to a close.

Read the rest of this entry »

Erin Baiano for The New York Times
Published: July 22, 2010

A “Hip-Hop Hungama” class at the Bollywood Funk NYC Dance School is one of many Bollywood classes in the city.
By SHIVANI VORA

IT’S an especially warm summer evening, but the weather is no match for the heat inside a spacious studio at Dance Theater Workshop in Chelsea. Nearly 20 men and women sing as they sway from side to side, swivel their hips, kick their legs up in the air and do fast semi-squats to the catchy beat of “Pretty Woman,” a Hindi song from the popular Bollywood movie “Kal Ho Naa Ho” (“Tomorrow May Never Come”). They repeat the sequence again and again until they’re dripping.

This high-energy group is taking part in BollyBasics, a dance class that grooves to songs from Bollywood, the Hindi film industry known for movies with splashy dance numbers. The routines can challenge even the most consistent gymgoers, and New Yorkers have their pick of several classes that teach the choreography and offer a cardio workout at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »

Drifting through the world salad

By Elizabeth Zimmer

Friday night’s WDA concert, which sticks in my mind as being a study in floaty white things, opened with a dramatic production out of Taiwan, strongest as a piece of visual art with understated movement motifs. Wen-jinn Luo’s 2009 work, An Independent Sleep, performed by the Scarecrow Contemporary Dance Company, was essentially a video rendering of a poem by Emily Dickinson, “A Long Long Sleep,” projected in calligraphic script on the paper-covered stage floor. The surface was bumpy; I guessed, correctly, that a body lay under the strips of paper. A schematic sculptured leaf dominated the upstage space, and a single dancer in pale clothing walked from stage right to stage left, very slowly, with an open book balanced on her head, as the words of the poem scrolled across the paper.
I found my focus split between trying to read the poem and attend to the dancer, a chore made more complex when the body under the paper emerged and began writing with a finger on the projected words, then on her own skin. Piano music, first by Michael Wall and then the “Dying Swan” theme of Saint-Saëns, floated in the atmosphere. A second woman emerged from under the paper, also writing on her skin and in the air with her finger. She rolled herself up in a strip of the paper as the text on the floor kept mutating. After a long time several stagehands, dressed all in black, calmly rolled up the rest of the paper strips, while one of their number carried the rolled-up girl away. The girl with the book on her head continued her slow, undulating walk.

Read the rest of this entry »

World Salad

By Elizabeth Zimmer

Like just about everything else in contemporary culture, dance has become commoditized: you can buy it, you can sell it, and you can use it to build your brand.

Aspiring American dancers who used to flock eagerly to their favorite choreographers, taking class for years and participating in groundbreaking experiments for little or no compensation, are now, like everyone else, in it for the money and the glory. They show up for auditions with little knowledge of a choreographer’s work, inquiring primarily about the terms of the contract, or they set up shop right out of school, forming companies before they’ve ever performed in one.

The primary exception to this development occurs on college campuses, where student dancers still perform for free (or merely for credit) in dances by their teachers, friends and visiting artists. They also still demonstrate the loyalty and enthusiasm formerly manifest in the professional world, and sometimes continue working in these relationships after graduating and moving on.
Read the rest of this entry »

DANCE THEATER WORKSHOP
is awarded $75K from Robert Sterling Clark Foundation

to expand

The Suitcase Fund:
A Project of Ideas and Means in Cross-Cultural Artist Relations
into the Middle East and Africa

New York, NY, JULY 21, 2010 – Dance Theater Workshop, the preeminent U.S. based center for contemporary dance and performance, was named today as a recipient of a $75,000 grant from the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation to be used to expand The Suitcase Fund: A Project of Ideas and Means in Cross-Cultural Artist Relations.

Founded in 1985 The Suitcase Fund seeks to:

· Facilitate access to other cultures by providing artists with opportunities to research, create or disseminate their work;

· Encourage practical relations and increased avenues of opportunity among the world’s diverse artists and the communities they serve; and,

· Foster a broader social and political context for the global communication of cultural ideas.

Since 1990 with generous support from the Trust for Mutual Understanding, The Suitcase Fund has been actively involved in Eastern Europe. The support of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation will allow Dance Theater Workshop to begin to expand the reach of this program to the Middle East and Africa specifically, Mali, Lebanon and Senegal.

Carla Peterson, Dance Theater Workshop’s Artistic Director commented, “The Suitcase Fund is particularly valuable given that artists are guides to the shared cultural heritages that cross political borders, and art itself is a gateway to a greater understanding of different lands and their inhabitants.”

Andrea Sholler, Dance Theater Workshop’s Executive Director lauded Margaret C. Ayers, President of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation by saying, “Peggy recognized the importance of cultural engagement in promoting global understanding through the development of sustained relationships and good will. The research she has recently completed and reported on under the title, Promoting Public and Private Reinvestment in Cultural Exchanged-Based Diplomacy, will serve as a framework for future arts grant making at the Foundation which will emphasize support for the export of artists and their work to parts of the world that have limited exposure to American artists. She views the expansion of The Suitcase Fund into the Middle East and Africa as an important element in the Foundation’s developing program. We are honored to receive this support and excited about how it will allow The Suitcase Fund to move forward.” Read the rest of this entry »

Thierry Thieu Niang, summer workshop!

WORKSHOP
From August 10th to 26th
Monday to Friday from 1pm to 5pm

PUBLIC PERFORMANCES

August 27th & 28th

Both young and old, professionals and amateurs, the boldest of the bold and the shyest of the shy are invited to join! All we ask is for curiosity and a willingness to try something new…

About the workshop
FACES AND BODIES: They are centered around movement, approaching dance with improvisations and compositions themed around faces and bodies. Technique is not of main concern. Groups of 15 to 20 people will be chosen by Niang to form groups of all generations [from 8 to 99 years old] and all backgrounds [dancer, musician, actor, fine artist... ] to ultimately create a piece to be performed.

The workshop will take place for 15 days. Participants must register for a minimum of 5 days

5 days workshop: $100
Full workshop: $150

REGISTER NOW by emailing us at theinvisibledog.ny@gmail.com and please include a resume or a short autobiography.

the invisible dog
51 bergen street
brooklyn ny 11201
www.theinvisibledog.org

Photo credit: Lucien Zayan

This Residency is made possible by the generous support of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York.

__________________________

Thierry Thieu Niang works as much with professional artists as children and amateur adults. 
Through many workshops and residences of work and creation, Thierry has worked with a diverse variety of venues, including public studios, theatres, schools, hospitals, even prison - all to explore the danced movement and its representations. For this dancer and choreographer, the artistic act requires the attention of each participant to make possible the creation of a work. These formations have been undertaken in experiment from over several years both in France and abroad - including Nairobi, New York, London, Madrid, Milan and Berlin. Within these experimentation events, artists of all different fields - including dancers, musicians, actors, plastics technicians, writers - along with amateurs are invited to give input regarding the tools of improvisation and composition to allow the creation of a language through which bodies, spaces and cultures can meet. This season, Niang is working as an Associated Artist with Norah Krief, Angélique Clairand, Catherine Nicolas, Lancelot Hamelin, Massed Eric and Olivier Balazuc with the Comedy of Valence at Richard Brunel. He also collaborates and works with Ariane Ascaride, Marie Desplechin, Clara Cornil, Julie Kretzschmar, Geoffrey Coppini, Jean Paul Wenzel, Romain Duris, Patrice Chéreau, Bastien Lefèvre and the musicians Saori Furukawa, Takumi Fukushima, Strasnoy Oscar, Klaus Janek and François Thuillier.