The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage : Blog

Learning to make, not to stew

2012-05-21T12:01:47+00:00

Left to right: Nichole Canuso and Wendy Houston at the Live Arts Studio Learning to make, not to stew Reflections on a visit to Nichole Canuso’s studio to observe her work during her planning project, Directing My Dancers/Directing Myself by Josie Smith and Lucy Warrington In her planning project, Directing My Dancers/Directing Myself, dance artist and choreographer Nichole Canuso is working to “fortify her movement practice, and strengthen her vision as a performer, choreographer, and collaborating artist.” She is focused on both her overall approach to the process of making dance and the specific components of her “choreographic toolbox,” and hopes that by developing the former, she can have the space to hone the latter. Canuso approached British choreographer and dance artist Wendy Houstoun to be a guide in this endeavor. Houstoun’s capacity to connect narrative to a specific movement vocabulary, to locate her personal narratives within a larger...

Mark Morris working with Voloshky on original dance piece

2012-04-27T18:20:40+00:00

One of the ways in which Voloshky Ukrainian Dance Ensemble is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year is by working with contemporary choreographer Mark Morris on the creation of an original Center-funded dance piece made for the ensemble. He will also design the costumes. Morris is the artistic director of Mark Morris Dance Company in Brooklyn, NY, and the recipient of multiple awards and honors, such as the 2010 Leonard Bernstein Lifetime Achievement Award for the Elevation of Music in Society. He is well-known throughout the world for innovative choreography that integrates a diverse range of traditions and techniques, from Eastern European folk dance to classical ballet and modern dance. Voloshky artistic director Taras Lewyckyj felt that Morris’ background as “a choreographer who [embraces] folk traditions while creating wildly innovative contemporary works” made him an exciting choice to expand the range of company work. In another partnership that reflects the...

Texas Time Out!

2012-04-24T17:08:09+00:00

At the end of March through the first week of April, I had the opportunity to join in part two of the “Texas Time Out” professional development practicum trip coordinated by Dance Advance to Marfa, Texas. Working with Nina Martin (choreography, performance), Mark Taylor (somatic body work), and Suzanne Carbonneau (dance writer and thinker) and several Philadelphia dance artists we spent time in the studio, toured the Judd Foundation, engaged in many lively discussions and experienced the vast Texas landscape through hikes and a sunset meditation. I had never been to Texas, or experienced the desert in this way. My response to this wide and thorny landscape was immediate and visceral. Spontaneously, I embodied the feeling of the horizon into my chest and shoulders to consciously open up these creaky and ever tightening areas of my body. I inhaled and exhaled deeply, and I inhaled and exhaled deeply again and...

Recently published on Dance Advance website: Conversation with Wendy Rogers and Sara Rudner

2012-04-16T13:10:43+00:00

Dance Advance is pleased to announce that "Capturing the Tone, Celebrating the Work," a conversation between choreographers Wendy Rogers and Sara Rudner has been recently posted on our website. This article is located in the Publications & Research, Document(s), Dance Odyssey on the Dance Advance website. Read this conversation here, or find it yourself in this section of our website. This conversation took place on September 29, 2007 at The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Rogers and Rudner discussed their collaborative work from the 1970s, and ruminated on how the intersection of life and art gave value to their dancing identities. "When I see people dancing and they’re realizing who they are, it’s like the best gift in the world." —Sara Rudner, page 23 "I think what we both like is really stellar ways of not knowing what we’re doing." —Wendy Rogers, page 4

Flamenco, Now: Interview with Elba Hevia y Vaca at thINKingDANCE.net

2012-03-06T15:42:36+00:00

photo by Jacques-Jean Tiziou from the thINKingDANCE website Learn about the career trajectory and the aspirations of Artistic Executive Director of Pasión y Arte, Elba Hevia y Vaca, in a recent interview of Elba by Lynn Matluck Brooks, at thINKingDANCE.net. In this interview, Elba discusses the recent evolution of flamenco both in Philadelphia and in Spain, the upcoming Flamenco Festival that comes to Philadelphia later this month, and her ideas for the direction Pasión y Arte is headed next. Click here to find more information on this upcoming festival, and here to learn more about Pasión y Arte. You can read the interview at thINKingDANCE.net, by clicking here.

Coverage of Fort Blossom residency events at thINKingDANCE.net

2012-03-05T17:01:05+00:00

On the thINKingDANCE.net website, you can read about the recent week-long residency at Bryn Mawr college of the John Jasperse company that culminated in the remounting of ground-breaking Fort Blossom by John Jasperse. Coverage of the Fort Blossom residency on thINKingDANCE.net consists of posts by the following authors: 1. Ellen Gerdes' notes on the residency symposium 2. Julie Diana's response to viewing open rehearsal 3. Megan Bridge and Peter Price's review of the performance 4. Kirsten Kaschock's review of the performance

Reflections on trip to Ann Arbor, Michigan and Toronto in January 2012

2012-03-05T15:56:16+00:00

Photo of Shannon Murphy (left) and Sahara Morimoto (right) (Artistic Associate at Peggy Baker Dance Projects) In late January, 2012, Dance Advance co-sponsored a professional development trip with the Philadelphia Music Project, and took a small group of music and dance constituents to Ann Arbor, MI to see two preview performances of the third revival of the ground-breaking opera Einstein on the Beach, which premiered in 1976. Einstein on the Beach was created by a collaborative team that consisted of theater director Robert Wilson, composer Philip Glass, and choreographers Andy deGroat, Dana Reitz, and Lucinda Childs. Gaining a Bigger Picture by Shannon Murphy I recently joined a group of Philadelphia based dancers, choreographers, and composers on a trip to Ann Arbor, Michigan to see the preview of the revival of Einstein on the Beach. Collectively, each portion of the trip has resulted in my ongoing journey of looking at the...

Reflections on SEM/CORD November 2011: Lisa Kraus

2012-02-13T15:43:10+00:00

What session was most impactful for you, and what issues or questions did it bring up? Through my contrasting experiences in two separate sessions I was surprised by the degree to which I perceived scholarly discourse as having the ability to fruitfully reveal previously unconsidered aspects of dance works already familiar to me, or to obfuscate, through a researcher’s narrowing into one hypothesis, the work’s import. In the session on Masculinity/Choreography, chair Clare Croft presented a stunning account of the backlash resulting from the Martha Graham Company’s participation in State Department tours. It was a revelation to hear the degree to which an earlier “culture war” followed on Graham’s frank portrayals of female sexual desire performed in a framework using artists as ambassadors. The floor of Congress was occupied at the time with specious descriptions of Graham’s work, stirring a “witch hunt” mentality in the halls of power, not unlike...

Contemporary Performance of Sex, Gender and Embodiment

2012-02-07T16:11:27+00:00

In connection with the world premiere performances of Fort Blossom Revisited 2000/2012 by John Jasperse Company February 24-26, Bryn Mawr College will host a Symposium on The Contemporary Performance of Sex, Gender and Embodiment on Saturday February 18, 2012 from 1-5pm in the Hepburn Teaching Theater, Goodhart Hall. Admission is free and open to all. Fort Blossom (2000), choreographed and designed by Jasperse, is a 40-minute work in which the audience is invited to examine contemporary notions of how we experience the body as both owners and spectators. Simultaneously shocking and beautiful, it is being revisited and expanded into a 60-minute piece with lead support from Bryn Mawr College, funded by The Pew of Center for Arts & Heritage through Dance Advance. The slow, sustained angling and partnering of nude dancers in Fort Blossom present direct and un-commodified experiences of the body alone and in relationship. Jasperse wrote that the...

Reflections on “Marfa Time-Out,” November 2011

2012-01-30T21:35:25+00:00

One of the provocative and evocative contentions that emerged in discussions during our “Marfa Time-Out” excursion is that European-based contemporary dance suffers from being “ahistorical”—that by reifying innovation, dancemakers, funders, presenters, and audiences alike engage in a pretense—that we keep reinventing the wheel because we reject, or don’t acknowledge, what has come before. Whether or not this claim is accurate as a generalization of attitudes toward contemporary western dance, I share the feeling that a seemingly insatiable quest for the “new” in modern dance results in work that often feels to me ungrounded, unfocused, and pretentious. These conversations about modern dance and its relationship to its past replayed in my mind as I discussed with dancer/choreographer Dianne McIntyre my reactions to seeing Martha Clarke’s Angel Reapers (2011), a 70-minute piece inspired by the tenets and ecstatic embodiments of the Shaker movement and the life of Ann Lee, an early Shaker...