Happy to be kicking off the 2019-2020 season of Dance Talks at the South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center this Saturday, Nov. 19th by talking about a pair of my adult and childhood obsessions. Ballet, with the lovely, lively Dimensions Dance Theatre of Miami, and Greek mythology, which I adored and read obsessively as a kid….
Tag: dance in miami
Remain in Light – Brigid Baker’s Dance is a Natural Wonder
Choreographer Brigid Baker is fascinated by the miraculous strangeness of the natural world, by its beauty and non-human weirdness. In her newest piece, Remain in Light (set to and inspired by the visionary 1980 David Byrne/Brian Eno album), she celebrates the “otherness” of the natural world and attempts to meet and engage it through movement….
Beautiful Brutality – Machismo and Femicide in Tania Perez-Salas’ “Macho Man XXI”
Tania Perez-Salas’s Macho Man XXI is relentless: an hour of visually gorgeous, physically gripping, emotionally grueling – even abusive – dance. After her company’s Saturday night performance at Miami Dade County Auditorium, presented by Fundarte, one woman said she was left longing for some kind of redemption; for the men to be punished, for the…
Like Life and Love. A review of Rosie Herrera’s “Carne Viva.”
Rosie Herrera’s Carne Viva at Miami Light Project last Thursday started with a deceptively static pose: dancer Simon Thomas-Train holding Ivonne Batanero overhead. But this is not a traditionally triumphant dance lift. His arms extend straight up, his hands gripping her armpits, while her arms reach directly out to the side, so that she becomes…
Body Power – Rosie Herrera’s “Carne Viva” Bares Body and Soul in Wynwood
For a dancer, flesh is power: content, identity, expression, being. In Catholicism – and romantic love – flesh is weak: temptation, vulnerability. Choreographer Rosie Herrera digs into those contradictions in Carne Viva, the first group piece her company has performed in Miami in years, showing at the Miami Light Project’s space in Wynwood Thursday through…
Talking about Dougla and Dance Theatre of Harlem
The next Dance Talk in the series I’ve been hosting for the South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center is for the much anticipated return of Dance Theatre of Harlem, which made a big stir last year when the Center hosted the company’s return to Miami after almost two decades. We’ll explore the inspiration and background of…
Poetry in Motion – The Return of Brigid Baker’s Big Beautiful and Wonderlawn
The choreographer and avant-garde godmother Brigid Baker stages a rare performance outside her Little Havana creative home, the 6th Street Dance Studio, this Thursday and Friday. Baker, a key (though not always sufficiently acknowledged as such) master dance teacher and artistic mentor in Miami, will present her pieces Wonderlawn, a reflection on the early AIDS…
Full Circle – Choreographer Christopher Rudd returns to Miami with Dance Now!
Even as a first grader at RR Moton Elementary in South Miami-Dade, Christopher Rudd wanted to dance. But a teacher at the arts magnet school told Rudd dance wasn’t for boys, and so instead he tried art (disastrous) and acting (also.) And that could have been that for him. But when he was in fourth…
Dance Deja Vu – Edward Villella and Three Generations of Ballet in Miami
When Edward Villella first performed Tarantella, the rocket-powered pas de deux that George Balanchine made on him and Patricia McBride in 1964, he had to drop to his hands and knees to catch his breath every time he shot offstage. Today in Miami he watched, smiling, as Eric Pikieris and Claudia Lezcano, of Dimensions Dance…
Voluptuous Rigor – Trisha Brown Dance Company at ICA Miami
Luscious and austere. Severely abstract and exuberantly physical. In her half-century long career, choreographer Trisha Brown traversed the limits of expression to create a unique and profoundly influential body of work. Which makes it an extremely big deal that the Trisha Brown Dance Company is performing at the ICA Miami this week, their first time…
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