| 'Uneven' ballet enthusiastically received
Ardrey Auditorium's stage came alive Friday evening with soft pastel colors and the lithe bodies of visiting ballet troupe USA Ballet as they treated Flagstaff to a contrasting program of dance, a bit uneven in quality but demonstrative of the finer aspects of both modern and traditional ballet theatre.The program was under the sponsorship of the Flagstaff Symphony Orchestra as one of the events in its 2006-2007 season line up.A collaboration between USA Ballet founder Kenneth Bello and jazz composer Howard Savage titled "Give Me Five" opened the program with a bare set illuminated with pastel hues of orange and pink, and the full company of dancers in basic black-and-white contemporary attire. A theme of posturing and competitive males foisting their attention on a bevy of young ladies gave opportunity for an athletic and angular style of dancing more in the vein of what has been come to called "modern dance," contrasting with the more traditional ballet style with which some members of the troupe proved to be more comfortable.A rather unoriginal and traditional jazz score was not too well recorded and sonically reproduced, and some awkward and repetitive choreography did not bode well for this newer part of the company's repertoire.
Hip-hop and ballet convergein Decadancetheatre
Sugar Loaf Kings Theatre Company will present the intense, high energy performance Decadance vs. the Firebird at the Lycian Centre for the Performing Arts in Sugar Loaf, on Saturday, March 10 at 8 p.m.Decadancetheatre was founded in August 2000 in Brooklyn, and is made up of all female dancers from the US and Japan. Ready to move out of dancing in the background, these women joined together to create a new outlet for hip-hop performance. Decadancetheatre is out to take hip-hop - the style, the attitude, the energy, and the female dancers - out of the background of music videos and into the forefront of theatrical performance. The Company was nominated for the 2004 Time Out New York Audience Choice Bessie Award and won the 2004 Fringe NYC Excellence in Choreography award for their performance of Decadance vs.
Black dancers ready to stretch in ballet
One of the stories that took front and center at last weekend's Super Bowl was that of the Chicago Bears' Lovie Smith and Indianapolis Colts' Tony Dungy marking the first time two black head coaches had taken their respective teams to that event. When I was a kid, you could have counted the number of black quarterbacks on the fingers of a single hand, and it wouldn't have taken that many fingers, but times change. Now it's not a marvel that there are dozens. As we celebrate Black History Month, I think about the parallels, inexact as they might be, to the dance world. These days, there are plenty of black choreographers and black dancers of note, but even now, why does it still take only one hand to count the number of black principal dancers in the major ballet companies? Are black dancers not as interested in classical ballet? Do ballet companies have trouble envisioning an African-American star? Where are all those black quarterbacks of ballet? Of course, these are complicated questions in some ways, and in others revealing ones, and I'll say right up front that I haven't got any answers.
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