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Posts Tagged ‘dance’

Dance for Grandma

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 19, 2013| Leave a Comment »

In the UK, retirees are taking up ballet.

Emma Ailes writes for BBC Scotland, “In a locker room at Scottish Ballet, a group of dancers are lacing up their ballet shoes. Only one thing marks them out from the other dancers here. These dancers are all in their 60s and 70s.

“Today, they are rehearsing ‘Swan Lake.’

“Among them is Alicia Steele. She danced when she was young. Now, nearly 80, she’s back.

” ‘I went to keep-fit classes, but I found them a bit boring,’ she says. ‘And I love the music with the piano. I just love it and it makes you feel a bit young again. It doesn’t make you look young, but it makes you feel young inside.’

“There’s been a 70% jump in the number of adult dancers signing up for classes in recent years, according to the Royal Academy of Dance. Some, like Alicia, danced when they were young. Others are complete beginners.

“Their oldest ballerina is 102.” More.

I took ballet both as a child and as an adult. But for now, I am sticking with tai chi chuan. Today the teacher had me learning complicated new moves with the advanced students. “You deserve it,” he said to me.

I’m not sure how to take that.

Photo: BBC Scotland

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Trash Man Choreography

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on October 13, 2013| 3 Comments »

I took modern dance in high school. The teacher was said to have studied with Isadora Duncan, and she certainly liked that flowing kind of movement.

Miss Hinney once challenged us to choreograph a dance about an abstract topic. Page and I chose Lavoisier’s discovery of oxygen, for which we used music from the Firebird Suite. We were not allowed to act it out as if we were Lavoisier, rather we had to interpret the chemical reaction using dance. It was impossible, so we were naturally very proud when we pulled it off.

Since then I have felt a great respect for the inventiveness of choreographers.

Here is one who sounds pretty cool. Allison Orr has closely observed garbage men in Austin, Texas, and has made their movements into a dance. More recently she worked with employees of the power company.

Robert Faires at the Austin Chronicle describes “The Trash Project, her award-winning, phenomenally popular collaboration with the city’s Solid Waste Services Department (now Resource Recovery) that made dancers of sanitation workers and the machines they operate. … Now, the Forklift Danceworks artistic director is at it again, albeit with a different city department, Austin Energy, whose employees are the focus for PowerUP. …

“For Orr, who’s made a career of making dances from the movements of people who aren’t trained in the art form – firefighters, gondoliers, roller skaters, orchestra conductors, Elvis impersonators, traffic cops, et al. – the personal stories of her subjects have become as important as their moves. She talks at length to the people with whom she collaborates on a dance and weaves recorded excerpts from interviews into the performance as the subjects are moving,” The latest Production, PowerUP was performed in September at the Travis County Exposition Center. More.

Photo: John Anderson
Power company choreography.

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Sentenced to Dance

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on September 8, 2013| 2 Comments »

A program in Europe that deals with school dropouts and youth who are in trouble with the law is turning many around.

Katrin Bennhold writes for the NY Times about Dance United. “This is no ordinary dance company. The young people at Dance United have a background in trouble, not ballet. …

“Referred by schools, parents and more often youth services, they train six hours a day for six weeks with professional contemporary coaches in a highly disciplined dance boot camp. …

“On average, 7 in 10 make it onto the stage; of those, 8 in 10 return to mainstream education or work, and more than 3 in 4 do not commit offenses or become repeat offenders. One in 10 even goes on to study dance professionally, with one Dance United graduate, Matthew-Jay Pratt, now in his final year at the competitive Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music & Dance in London.

“It is one of the most original and successful youth engagement programs in Britain, costing its private and public backers about $3,000 per person but saving society an estimated $128,000 in legal costs and welfare benefits, according to New Philanthropy Capital, a research firm that calculates returns for donors to charity. …

“Dance United started out in the 1990s, working with Ethiopian street children, youths in post-reunification Germany and young Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. …

“Ask Trey what he has learned and he eagerly shows off his favorite move: a long sideways jump, his face and chest turned skyward and his arms wide open.

“But he has also learned about getting up in the morning, even when his mother is still asleep, and how to follow a healthy diet. …

“And Trey has learned about books and the power to take control of your own story.” More.

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Kiev Subway Dancing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 24, 2013| Leave a Comment »

My husband heard that the Kiev subway is a popular place for older Russians and Ukrainians to go dancing. So I Googled around a bit and found stories at Odd Stuff Magazine, here, and the Daily Mail, here. And a video at YouTube. In today’s world, you can’t keep a good story down.

At the Daily Mail (which seems to favor bullet points) Helen Lawson writes, “Saturday night fever: The subway where Kiev’s pensioners dance and find love.

  •     The dancers cannot afford to pay for a venue so they use a metro subway
  •     The group meets every Saturday at 7 pm to socialise and dance
  •     About 20 couples are known to have met thanks to the meet-ups
  •     Reuters photographer Gleb Garanich documented the weekly gatherings

At Odd Stuff, photographer Garanichev Hleb (is that the same Reuters guy?) asks the subjects of his photos about the dance scene. “Milevsky Nicholas was born in 1938 and Natalia Stolyarchuk born in 1955 met at these dances and has since moved in together. This is one of the 20 couples who met at these clubs. ..

“Despite his age, both retired and still work together earn about 4,000 hryvnia per month. …

“These people do not communicate in social networks, but still remember all the holidays of childhood and youth, when put on the table, to visit friends and neighbors come, everywhere sounded cheerful sounds of accordion.” More.

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Leaping for Joy

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on November 21, 2012| 4 Comments »

Everyone is getting ready for Thanksgiving around here. John’s family has left for Syracuse to join culinary forces with my daughter-in-law’s family. My husband and I just arrived in Providence, where we will celebrate with Suzanne, Erik, my sister, and my brother-in-law.

Big cooking starts early tomorrow. But I already made the From Scratch Club’s cranberry sauce that was such a hit last year. (I found it on their WordPress blog.)

So as not to repeat myself too much, I am just going to share a link John sent me that captures the leaping-for-joy spirit that should be the essence of a holiday that is basically about eating a lot of food with people you like. And then maybe taking a nap and dreaming you are flying.

Check out the wonderful pictures at http://imgur.com/a/NAwjl

This is just one.

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Singing and Dancing in the Cemetery

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on October 16, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Being in the middle of an earthquake just now (a baby one), I got the urge to post about a cemetery.

Peter DeMarco wrote in the Boston Globe a while back about a lovely dance performance in the famed Mount Auburn Cemetery.

“The 100-member cast of ‘A Glimpse Beyond: A Unique Celebration of Life and Death’ leaves no one out: dancers, musicians, poets, puppeteers, sopranos, jazz singers, gospel choirs, and actors — some garbed as masked ‘spirit owls,’ others portraying the recently departed — join to make audiences ponder what lies ahead in the great beyond.”

According to DeMarco, the show was designed so that audience members could walk along, following the narrative as it unfolded “across the various graves, groves, and lush contours of America’s first garden cemetery.”

Bree Harvey, the cemetery’s vice president of external affairs, told the reporter that the performance was suited to Mount Auburn because “ ‘it’s a place of peace and tranquility, a place to commemorate the dead and console the bereaved and celebrate the lives of those buried here.’ ” More.

“Glimpse” reminds me of “When the Saints Go Marching in” and the New Orleans jazz parades that commemorate a life.

Back to the earthquake: John retweeted  prompt info from @NewEarthquake on twitter: “4.5 earthquake, 6km SSW of Lake Arrowhead, Maine. Oct 16 19:12 at epicenter.” It took NewEarthquake only four minutes to report. In case you haven’t gotten into twitter yet, it is truly the place to go for breaking news.

Photograph: Pamela Joye
“A Glimpse Beyond: A Unique Celebration of Life and Death” brought a 100-member cast onto the grounds of Mount Auburn Cemetery

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Dance versus Disability

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on August 5, 2012| Leave a Comment »

A NY Times article I saved from November 24, 2009, remains as inspirational as when I first read it.

In “Learning His Body, Learning to Dance,” Neil Genzlinger writes that “Gregg Mozgala, a 31-year-old actor with cerebral palsy, had 12 years of physical therapy while he was growing up. But in the last eight months, a determined choreographer with an unconventional résumé has done what all those therapists could not: She has dramatically changed the way Mr. Mozgala walks.

“In the process, she has changed his view of himself and of his possibilities.
Mr. Mozgala and the choreographer, Tamar Rogoff, have been working since last winter on a dance piece called ‘Diagnosis of a Faun.’ It is to have its premiere on Dec. 3 at La MaMa Annex in the East Village, but the more important work of art may be what Ms. Rogoff has done to transform Mr. Mozgala’s body.

“ ‘ I have felt things that I felt were completely closed off to me for the last 30 years,’ he said. ‘The amount of sensation that comes through the work has been totally unexpected and is really quite wonderful.’ ”

Choreographer Rogoff saw Mozgala perform the role of Romeo in a production by Theater Breaking through Barriers in March 2008 and knew she wanted to create a dance piece for him.

“Originally, [Ms. Rogoff] envisioned a simple study, maybe 10 minutes long. Mr. Mozgala’s expectations when he agreed to the project were equally narrow: he said that he thought that she would either merely create a dance that made use of the physical abilities he already had or, after seeing his limitations, tell him, ‘Thanks but no thanks.’ ”

It turned out that their expectations were way too narrow. Read more.

Photograph by Andrea Mohin at The New York Times shows Gregg Mozgala rehearsing with Emily Pope-Blackman.

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Collage and Editing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 24, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Sunday evening I went over to Concord Academy to hear Seán Curran talk about how he creates choreography. Betsy, one of the dancers from his company, did a beautiful job of demonstrating what he meant.

As a little boy growing up in Watertown, Seán said, he waited eagerly for the mail that brought Look magazine. He liked to cut out pictures and make collages with them.

He says that his approach to choreography is similar. He arranges many snippets or dance phrases in different ways. His challenge is to edit down the many ideas so that the choreography doesn’t topple from too much weight.

I make collages, too. I have always liked the idea of taking a bunch of random things people have said and trying to make a play out of them, for example.

I also make collage greeting cards. I keep a box of promising pictures, cut from magazines and gallery postcards. I go through the whole pile and set aside maybe 20 items that somehow remind me of the person for whom I am making the card. Then I edit them down to the few pieces that will be best for the particular occasion.

All that happens before I cut the shapes and decide on how to arrange them. Sometimes I do a cutout of a cutout and put something else in the space: for example, I cut a vista out of a painting of a window and put a girl in the space (bottom right).

Here are examples.

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Salsa in the Park

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on June 18, 2012| 2 Comments »

Feel like dancing? I’d love to see this sort of thing in every town in America. How nice it would be to walk a few blocks on a summer evening, and there it would be!

“It’s Monday night in Boston. Under the locust trees of the Blackstone Community Center surrounded by basketball games, tight parking spaces, and children playing, the dance floor heats up in the park as the night air cools off and the stars come out.

“Many salseros in Boston claim [Salsa in the Park] as their favorite event of the city, not only for the appeal of dancing outside ‘al aire libre’, but as a way to give back to the community. Dancers volunteer all summer, donating their time to teach dance lessons to adults and children, set up dance floors, assist with event staffing, maintain a recycling program, and clean up from the festivities until late into the evening.

“This event is staffed in collaboration with the Mayor’s Program of Cambridge, and the Blackstone Community Center Youth Summer Programs. We emphasize healthy lifestyle choices for the individual and the community, through dancing, healthy food options, and greening our event as much as possible with educational materials and interactive information.”

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Choreographing the Everyday

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on June 7, 2012| 3 Comments »

I read an article by Rebecca Milzoff in the NY Times recently that got me seeing people on the street in a new way.

Milzoff was interviewing a New York City choreographer about his latest work, and something he said stuck with me.

“ ‘I was assured when I came to live in this space on Broadway between Prince and Spring that SoHo would never come this far,’ David Gordon said, looking out the wall-to-wall windows in his second-floor loft. ‘Instead I now live in the Mall of America.’

“ ‘When I set foot out the door, there are so many people going in different directions,’ he said. ‘The choreography of the street is mind boggling.’ ”

Those words came back to me a couple days later as I waited for the morning train. There’s a point when bells start ringing because the gate is going down, and commuters stream across the parking lot with their briefcases and coffee mugs. On this particular day, they looked to me like dancers in a choreography of the everyday. The flow, the spacing between people suggested dance. The commuters had a special aura, partly because they had no consciousness of being in a dance performance.

I hope to be alert to other such happenings in the future.

It sure jazzes up the commute.

Photograph: Julieta Cervantes for The New York Times

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Playdate

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 3, 2011| 4 Comments »

Had an awesome playdate with my grandson and his parents today.

John and I pushed the stroller to a playground that has lots of climbing things and outgrown toys that families donate. On the way, we passed a neighbor’s yard. Smoke was curling up behind the fence. The three-year-old twins were roasting green coffee beans in an old popcorn maker, their dad watching. The children are apparently quite skillful aficionados and know the difference between “first crack” and “second crack,” a coffee-roasting concept that was news to me. They gave a jar of roasted beans to John to take home, with instructions to let the beans breathe overnight.

At the playground, there were many dads with toddlers. Only two moms. It seems to be a Saturday-morning phenomenon — proof that Suzanne’s high school friend Mike was onto something when he founded Playground Dad.

We also had fun playing in the pup tent that had temporarily taken over John’s dining room. And we danced. My grandson will dance at the drop of a hat. You don’t need to play music — singing a cappella or rattling a jar of freshly roasted coffee beans to a good beat will get him going. His dad took break dancing as a kid. Also tap. And his mom is a super dancer. So there you go.

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Did a Ballerina Spark Occupy Wall Street?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on October 18, 2011| Leave a Comment »

ArtsJournal.com sent me to this article describing a ballerina posed on the Wall Street bull. The article suggests that one of the many tipping points that led to the Occupy movement was this image of a dancer. I like to think that the arts can spark a movement, although I think the Arab Spring played a bigger role in this case.

 

“When Vancouver-based Adbusters presented the idea to the world, it did so in the form of a poster that featured a dancer posed on the shoulders of the Wall Street bull statue, a foggy clamour of demonstrators behind her. The poster asked the question, ‘What is our one demand?’ Activist groups seized on it, as did the hacktivist group Anonymous, and a collective began to form. …

 

“To hear tell from [Vancouver-based] Adbusters founder and editor Kalle Lasn now, the question of that one demand still needs to be answered concisely and directly. But as the movement overspills Wall Street, he describes it as the most successful in the 22 years he and his magazine have been advocating ‘culture jamming.’ ” Read more. The Kalle Lasn interview is at Seattle’s Crosscuts.com  (“news of the the great nearby,” whatever that means).

 

As intrigued as I am that a ballerina poster could have been a tipping point for a movement, I think the question, “What is our one demand?” is even more intriguing. I would like to spin off from that and ask, “What is the one thing you want (in general, not public policies necessarily)?” Could you name the one thing? I think this is different from making a wish and blowing out candles. But maybe not. I will give it some thought myself.

 

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Volunteers at a Women’s Prison

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 3, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I believe that people must take responsibility for their actions, that crimes should have punishments, and that every effort should be made to protect society from danger. But I don’t think society is protected if the place of punishment makes a person who committed a crime more angry and hostile than when she did it.

That’s why I like to post about the many kinds of volunteers who work with inmates to turn their hearts to better purposes. It may not always work, but it seems worth trying.

A while back, I blogged about one friend who works with ex-offenders through an organization called OWLL (On With Living and Learning: Jobs Skills for the 21st Century).

Now another friend has written about being accepted into a volunteer program at a low-level women’s prison near her home. The way this friend writes about her orientation, I can see the whole thing.

“I had a letter telling me not to bring a cell phone, smoking paraphernalia, medications, or sharp objects, and not to wear tight clothing, open-toed shoes, dangly earrings, or anything green or orange. … About half the volunteers were people of color and half were white. About a quarter spoke to one another in Spanish. More than half were middle-aged or older. One woman was in a wheelchair. So, it was a pretty diverse group. … There was lots of impressive high-tech security. There are lots of things we’re not allowed to do, like buy things for the inmates, or bring them messages. Or–and the volunteer handbook says this explicitly–help them escape or cover up an escape attempt.” (!)

Are touchy-feely prison programs all too naïve? Well, a highly skeptical prison warden at a Florida prison where there is a dance program admits that he came to see the benefit of women inmates having more-positive ways of expressing themselves:

 

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