Barnett Serchuk - Page 10

By my count, I've seen at least 250 productions in my lifetime, the last one in Australia. This, however, did not prepare me for Ballez's 'Sleeping Beauty & The Beast,' presented on Sunday, May 1st 2016, as part of the La Mama Moves! Festival. While this was meant to put a new spin on an old tale by gender bending mythical roles in the ballet canon, I have to admit that by the end I was neither surprised nor shocked into that feeling of astonishment when you witness something completely out of the ordinary.

To judge by Sunday's matinee on April 24, 2016, the New York City Ballet is in good dancing hands-shall I say excellent hands. If two of the three ballets that afternoon did not always meet the demands of the choreographic high level set forward by Balanchine, the dancing most certainly did. It was, to be understated, superb.

To judge by the film Reset (Releve)), which was recently shown at the Tribeca Film Festival, Benjamin Millepied, the soon to depart director of the Paris Opera Ballet, was a very lucky man. He could choreograph and commission works, construct innovative social media platforms and re-direct the school, along with dealing with entrenched hierarchies, bureaucracies, and all the other chies and cies that go with it.

We all know what it's like. You go to a performance that presents four different pieces, and by the end you swear that you've been seeing the same thing danced all night. It's like asking yourself: where did it start and finish, because you're in a Kafkaesque mode, and all you want is to be rescued into the realm of logic. Why exactly did the curators present this?

Olga El is a writer, director, and performance activist based in New York City. Her company, The Kandake Dance Theatre for Social Change, uses dance traditions from around the world to create socially relevant work and engage audiences and communities. This year is The Kandake's fifth anniversary, so I decided to ask Olga some questions about the company's unique foundations and where she thinks it may be headed in the future.

In the midst of some major illnesses and a deep depression, I was given Marsha Volgyi's new novel, 'The Crewmember,' to review. To say that it was just the antidote for my emotional state is an understatement; to say that I Iaughed out loud at least 500 times while reading the novel is doing the work a disservice. It was a wonderful journey on a cruise ship that propelled me into a state of near hysteria, and I don't laugh that easily.

Chris Alloways-Ramsey began his early training with Barbara (Olewine) Wouters, later completing his classical training with Mira Popovich and Dame Sonia Arova. He attended summer programs on full merit scholarships at Kirov Academy, School of American Ballet, Houston Ballet Academy, and San Francisco Ballet. Her graduated from high school at North Carolina School of the Arts with a focus in Ballet and received his A.L.B, cum laude, from Harvard University in 2003.

Entering New York University's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts on November 5, 2015, dancers from Troy Schumachers's group, BalletCollective, were already warming up on stage. You could feel the excitement in the air. All one had to do was scream 'go' and the dancers, high on performance octane, would have made a dash for it.

Frederick Douglass once described blackface performers as '...the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion, denied them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens.'

I wish I could have been more enthusiastic about the all-Jose Limon program on October 25, 2015, at 2 pm. It wasn't the dancers-just the repertory.

Ballet Memphis, under the artistic direction of Dorothy Gunther Pugh, will return to New York City's Joyce Theater (175 Eighth Avenue) for the first time since 2007 for a limited run this October. Performances begin Tuesday,October27th and run through Sunday, November 1st.

That Eryc Taylor is talented is a no-brainer; that he still needs focus is the question that needs addressing, and I think that this is a very pressing problem for his career.

Just when you think you are Sleeping Beautied out, along comes another production. This one however, is being produced on the other side of the world by the Australian Ballet. That's a long way to travel to see something you've already encountered in 500 other productions. On the other hand, why not? I'd never been to Australia and needed a vacation. So a 27-hour flight didn't seem to faze me. Plus, I would see a company that was almost totally unknown to me. I'd seen them on You Tube and was highly impressed. I missed them in New York, so this would be my chance not only to see the company, but Australia! Of course, there were other reasons. Like a great love I had in college 40 years before and had left because he wanted me to move to Melbourne with him. And I was going to meet him again! So if you combine the meeting of a past love and a new Sleeping Beauty, the combination was almost irresistible, at least to me. (I'm told that my brain works in peculiar ways, and this was definitely one of them!) So I booked a flight and in two days I was transported to one of the loveliest cities imaginable. And I could have been there 40 years earlier!

Pearl Buck, the Nobel Prize winning author, once wrote that 'if you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.' Which is what Australian Ballet Artistic Director David McAllister has attempted with his new production of Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty, which will premiere in Melbourne, Australia, on September 15 2015, before touring to Perth from October 7-10, and Sydney from November 17-December 16.

Pearl (www.PearlTheShow.com), a new American-Chinese dance-theatre spectacular, inspired by the life of Pearl S. Buck, the first woman to win both the Nobel and the Pulitzer Prizes, will have its world premiere at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center for 4 performances only, August 27-30th. The story, focusing on the substantial influence Pearl had on both Chinese and Western cultures, will be brought to life through new choreography by Daniel Ezralow (Ezralow Dance Company, MOMIX, Sochi Olympics Opening Ceremony, Academy Awards), a new score composed by Jun Miyake (collaborations with Robert Wilson, Pina Bausch, David Byrne and Oliver Stone) dazzling visuals and a company of 30 American and Chinese dancers.

Fadi J. Khoury, who serves as FJK Dance Company's Artistic Director, choreographer and principal dancer, connects Argentinean tango, Middle Eastern movement, classical ballet and ballroom dance in an innovative contemporary dance setting.

Tony Waag (Producer/Artistic/Executive Director/Teacher) founded the American Tap Dance Foundation (formerly known as the American Tap Dance Orchestra) in 1986, along with Brenda Bufalino and the late Charles 'Honi' Coles. From 1989-1995, he co-created and operated, with Ms. Bufalino, Woodpeckers Tap Dance Center which became a model for numerous tap organizations and tap studios worldwide creating, producing, and presenting various educational programs for adults and children year-round, as well as annual winter tap intensives with master classes, courses and workshops taught by leading International artists and master tap dancers.

When the Sadler's Wells (now the Royal Ballet) first performed "Cinderella" on its triumphant 1949 debut performance at the old Metropolitan Opera, John Martin, the eminent New York Times dance critic, was not engrossed. He wrote that it was difficult to be enthusiastic about it, but "if it were stripped of all its dead wood, both musical and choreographic, it would run considerably less than the two and a half hours it now undertakes to fill."

Ballet NY will present the world premiere of What Ever, choreographed by Medhi Bahiri, as well as works by John Butler, William Forsythe and Stanton Welch, July 9 - 11 at Ailey Citigroup Theater, 405 West 55th Street (at 9th Avenue).

Having visited Poland at least 50 times in my life, you'd think I would have sampled some opera, dance or music recital in the country. I suppose I had to be back on American soil to finally catch up with the Polish National Ballet, now playing at the Joyce Theater, offering two works by Pastor and one by Israeli choreographer Emanuel Gat.