I came to theater through literature: words brought to life onstage. But seeing any small amount of theater, you quickly realize that that much is…
View More JAPANAMERICA WONDERWAVE (Team Sunshine): Post-tsunami, pre-understanding
Category: Dance
Coverage of dance, movement, and related performance art in Philadelphia.
RED-EYE to HAVRE de GRACE (Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental): 2012 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival
An early version of this show lit up the Live Arts Festival in ’05, and I couldn’t wait to see the latest manifestation of the collaboration between Thaddeus Phillips’ Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental and Wilhelm Bros. music. The production has grown up over the intervening years. It’s bigger, wider, and deeper, and just as amazing and magical.
View More RED-EYE to HAVRE de GRACE (Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental): 2012 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival
Fringe Festival Takes Flight with Nichole Canuso Dance Company at the APS Museum
RETURN RETURN DEPARTURE considers the fleeting nature of time and the human compulsion to capture it, and there can be few more poignant examples than an ephemeral dance duet at sunset, videotaped for posterity by the performers themselves.
View More Fringe Festival Takes Flight with Nichole Canuso Dance Company at the APS Museum
Twenty years of Headlong Dance Theater
Through its nearly twenty-year history, Headlong Dance Theater has been stretching boundaries. Stylistically, the company has incorporated such movement backgrounds as ballet, jazz, Bharata Natyam,…
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Wild Bunch in Wild Punch in Kensington
California transplant John Rosenberg opened the Papermill Theater in an old (you guessed it) paper mill in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia in 2010. Since then, it’s…
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Annie’s Got a Brand New Bag: See It at the Philly Fringe
Annie Wilson is a local dancer-choreographer-performer-art maker type who has been making her presence known these past several years since graduation from the University of…
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Personal Thoughts Made Physical: Jaamil Kosoko talks dance, poetry, and the Gemini Show
Philly-based choreographer and dance impresario Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is a busy man these days—creatively, curatorially, and administratively. He recently changed the name of his company…
View More Personal Thoughts Made Physical: Jaamil Kosoko talks dance, poetry, and the Gemini Show
Dance and Music Rights, or When Were You Planning To Pay For That Music, Friend?
In the not distant past, I was watching a dance performance, which I was enjoying, and I couldn’t help thinking—if this dance company was caught…
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Lessons from Newt Gingrich: or how we in the theatre and dance communities can stop acting like losers and learn to make the nation love us
How often have you heard that performing arts are dying, that we’re a niche market, that you can never make a living off of it,…
View More Lessons from Newt Gingrich: or how we in the theatre and dance communities can stop acting like losers and learn to make the nation love us
Meta is Dead. Long Live Meta.
I want to talk about shows in theatre and dance that deal with the audience head on. In other words, works that acknowledge the existence…
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Conceptual Dance and Star Power
My dance vocabulary is limited, so please forgive me as I redefine terms for my own benefit. When I say conceptual dance, I am referring…
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The Right Moves: BalletX’s Summer Series at the Wilma Theater
Perhaps it was a natural cultural chauvinism that kept me away from ballet for so long, even as my sister danced her way through elementary…
View More The Right Moves: BalletX’s Summer Series at the Wilma Theater