As part of the 12 Nights of Electronic Music and Art presented by the FETA Foundation, Swedish composer Adrian Knight joins four University of Miami composition grad students, for an evening of guitars, violin, saxophone, narration and lots of electronics.

By the fourth time the rows of fifth graders were exhorted to raise their voices, they were psyched. “Roooooaaaaaaarhhhh,” they again shouted. This time it worked. The community had spoken; bullying muscle-bound storm god Anzu was routed; the huluppu tree was liberated!

You actually could leave the kids home and still thoroughly enjoy Inanna and the Huluppu Tree. Combining music, dance, aerial acrobatics and theater, the piece was created by Miami Theater Center (MTC)’s founder, Stephanie Ansin and artistic collaborator, Fernando Calzadilla. Based on ancient Sumerian myths, and featuring original music by Luciano Stazzone with choreography by Octavio Campos and aerial choreography by Lleigh Reynolds, it is presented at the MTC in Miami Shores.

If yours are not among the busloads of South Florida schoolchildren lining up for weekday morning performances, bring them to a Saturday evening show. A well-produced study guide serves as a crib sheet to the unfamiliar names and the story line, while also giving props to Sumerian innovations: the wheel, writing, irrigation, arithmetic, the hover-craft. (Not really, but Inanna’s brother Utu’s nimble horseless chariot is slick.)

Actually, the play’s strongest take-away lies in its moral messages, rather than historical lessons. These are first intoned by Great Grandmother Earth, Goddess Ninhursag (Shaneeka Harrell), in a resounding invocation to the play’s principals, her offspring. And more injunctions percolate up during the course of a drama that is delivered in a flowing sequence of short songs, performed with varying degrees of finesse; a wide-ranging musical backdrop; and dances created by Campos in an appealing diversity of fanciful styles — Middle Eastern-ish.

As the play opens, three masked acolytes peer through a richly painted scrim and nervously ask, “Where is he? Where is he?” A restive crowd in the ancient city of Uruk impatiently awaits the coronation of a new king, Prince Gilgamesh (Rico Reid), son of the late king. But he is AWOL, and the play’s namesake character, Inanna (vivacious Diana Garle) — goddess of love, war, fertility, plus a few other divine attributes — is desperate. She has descended with haunting luminosity from heaven to crown Gilgamesh, and he is a no-show. What’s a goddess to do? Stage a diversion.

Enter the huluppu tree. Uprooted and washed adrift in a river of the Urukians’ tears (grieving their king’s death), this sapling was rescued by Inanna, and, after a three-generation divine family dust-up, she plants it next to the temple to serve as a time-marker for the arrival of a new king. Thus, we have our diversion.

But in drama, as in life, plans go awry. Replete with golden fruit and elegantly crafted in graceful wooden arcs and poles, the huluppu tree stands commandingly center stage. It grows thicker and denser before our eyes. An attractive nuisance, however, it soon hosts an unwelcome encampment of three lively new deities (the Sumerians had thousands of them), two of whom flap, roar, swoop and somersault in the air: Luckner Bruno’s thunder-cracking Anzu and acrobatic goddess of merriment and laughter, Siduri (Ana Mendez). They are lifted and propelled with skill and strength by unseen stagehands. (Tip of the hat to Cirque du Soleil, Crouching Tiger and MTC technical director, Ron Burns.)

These oversize characters, each with a distinctive trick bag, neglect official duties to instead cavort, vie for position and devour the tasty huluppu fruit (a few of which they toss into the audience). Among these three freeloaders, the “pharmacist” Ningizzida, (Troy Davidson) eloquently exploits his jokester role and his signature props: a roulette wheel of maladies and herbal remedies and a multi-pocketed cloak of herbs. Inanna is stymied by these loafing lodgers, but then Prince Gilgamesh, the would-be king, returns from his pilgrimage and is put to the test: Can he turn out the freeloaders and restore order to the kingdom? Can Inanna keep him on track, avoiding violence? Will the audience repeatedly surge to his aid? (Does Superman wear a cape?)

Some of the larger-than-life characters are effectively amped-up with computer-enhanced voices and, in the case of Anzu, by that glorious steroidal body armor, enormous wings and yellow-feathered legs. Subtleties of staging and delivery are interwoven amid broader styles of engagement with an indulgent and mostly guileless audience, reared on The Lion King, Star Wars and Xbox. The assembly eagerly embraces this combination of old and new stylings.

In the music, sound design, choreography and deep, richly layered set, we inhabit an ambiguous milieu, but when did you last encounter “authentic” Sumerian music or dance? A combination of live percussion (musicians perched in a Mondrian-like scaffolding within a luminous cathedral of modulated blue light) and commissioned music evocative of such diverse sources as John Williams’ extra-terrestrial scores, early rap and Putamayo’s Arabic Groove carries us through tonal moods that complement the drama. Never outright campy, the playwrights, director, choreographer and actors give an occasional wink to avoid sanctimoniousness, even as they preach that old time religion.

Confession one: My wife and I have no children. Confession two: We cheered with the best of them. You will too.

May 1 – June 2, 2013 at the Miami Theater Center, 9806 N.E. 2nd Ave., Miami Shores; at 10:00 a.m. Tuesdays through Fridays; 7:00 p.m. Saturdays; cost is $20; 305-751-9550; www.mtcmiami.org.

The recently formed multicultural dance troupe founded by dancer/choreographer and NWSA professor Peter London gets its first big local stage outing for “Spring Nights at the Arsht,” which is comprised of six new dances.

“The Best of the Classical Repertoire Gala” includes eight dances, two of which come from Marius Petipa from the 19th century. But the highlight of these performances is that many will be danced by six recent exiles from Cuba and the Cuban National Ballet, in their first U.S. performance, presented by artistic director Pedro Pablo Pena.

The Coral Gables Congregational Church’s Community Arts Program All-Star Jazz Ensemble is one of the 15 finalists, and one of only four community ensembles, in the 2013 Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington Competition & Festival, taking place from May 10 to 12.  

The sound of “Echoes of Harlem” is unmistakably Ellington’s, without over-simplifications or apologies, regal and swinging — even if played in tank tops and flip-flops.

It’s just another rehearsal for the Coral Gables Congregational Church’s Community Arts Program All-Star Jazz Ensemble, but it’s a special one. There are just a handful of Thursday evenings left before the band plays in the finals of the 2013 Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington Competition & Festival in New York City.

Of the 15 finalists, South Florida will be represented by three ensembles: The Dillard Center for the Arts, Ft. Lauderdale;  the New World School of the Arts, Miami, and this All-Star Jazz Ensemble, one of only four community bands chosen nationwide.

“This is awesome,” says Daniel Sagastume, 17, the band’s baritone sax and a student at Coral Reef High School. “I never really thought I would have the possibility of something like this. This is something special.”

Daniel Strange, the director of the Ensemble, says that when they found out that had reached the finals “we were overjoyed.”

“We rehearse just one night a week, two and half hours and this is the Superbowl of high school jazz band competitions,” says Strange, also an adjunct professor at University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. “For us to be one of the finalists it’s huge. These guys will never forget this experience.”

The event includes not only the competition, but also workshops, jam sessions, and other activities. As an added incentive, the three top finalists will get to perform with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, as guest soloist. Already trumpeter Marcus Printup, drummer Ali Jackson, and trombonist Elliot Mason, current members of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, have visited Coral Gables to work with the band.

The All-Star Jazz Ensemble started with only 13 members, not enough for a big band, in 2009. According to CGCC literature, the Ensemble experience was “designed to sharpen sight reading, style, technique, improv, rhythm, recording studio skill, college prep and career development through the practical study and performance of jazz repertoire that spans the standards to newly-composed works.”

It was perhaps the most visible piece of an ambitious, evolving  program.

While the CGCC has had a Summer Concert Series since 1985, it instituted its Community Arts Program in 2002 with the arrival of Mark Hart, executive and artistic director. That same year, the church established the Conservatory for the Arts, an after-school program with the purpose to “make music education accessible to all kids,” explains Hart. “So even if they have financial difficulties, we make it possible for them to have a teacher and learn music. Our Saturday program is based on a sliding scale depending on what a parent can afford, it can go from full scale pay to nothing.”

The program includes several ensembles — including the Junior and Intermediate Orchestras, the Advance Chamber Ensemble, a Jazz Prep Band and the All-Star Ensemble — and its own recording label, CAP Records.

“When I started we had seven kids on a Tuesday evening,” recalls Hart. “Right now we have close to 125 kids in the program.”

Students must audition for the All-Star Jazz Ensemble, explains Strange, the director, “and we get the best players of each school. We’ve had good quality players from New World, Gulliver, Ransom Everglades, Coral Gables, Coral Reef, Felix Varela …. What’s interesting is that this is the best band we’ve ever had, yet this year we don’t have any players from the top fine arts schools.”

Sagastume, the bari sax player who next year will be attending New England Conservatory in Boston, didn’t have any experience in playing a large jazz ensemble.

“When I joined I had just got into high school and I wasn’t part of the band in my school,” he says. “We didn’t have a real jazz band, so when I got in here it was awesome. It’s been the best experience. We play such good literature. We play great classics from the Count Basie band or Glenn Miller. You don’t get this kind of exposure in a high school band because you get lower level [arrangements] Here we are playing the real deal.”

The Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ is located at 3010 De Soto Boulevard, (across from the Biltmore Hotel,  Coral Gables. For more information call 305-448-7421, ext. 120 or check CommunityArtsProgram.org.

The Miami City Ballet Company (MCB) will close its 2012-2013 season this weekend at the Arsht Center with Broadway and Ballet, a valentine to Jerome Robbins and George Balanchine. No surprise there, since the MCB has been acclaimed far and wide for its devotion to the masters, especially Balanchine. What makes this program so delicious is the unpredictable pairing of the works as well as the works themselves.

The first part of the performance belongs to Jerome Robbins. So successful was he as a choreographer of Broadway musicals — “West-Side Story,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “The King and I” are only a sampling of his handiwork — that it is easy to forget that Robbins loved ballet as well. And ballet as pure as it gets: that’s what his “Dances at a Gathering” is all about.

Originally created by Robbins in 1969 and set to the piano music of Chopin, it marked his return to more classical forms, most particularly pas de deux. The ballet has no props, and hardly any set. Five couples came together in no less than 18 movements, nearly all of them waltzes and Slavic mazurkas. This “Gathering,” in the hands of the rotating cast of MCB, which includes Jeanette and Patricia Delgado as well as Rene Penteado, is a nearly encyclopedic examination of flirtation. One may as often sigh at its sheer beauty of a piece as laugh aloud at its wit. There are the twists that Robbins was so fond of: a gesture at odds with the lyricism of a movement that manages to zap up its impact. And there are the times when flirtation becomes surrender. Look out then.

If the evening begins with elegance and a delight in non-narrative movement not ordinarily associated with Jerome Robbins, the evening ends with bawdiness and very nearly a funk not ordinarily associated with Balanchine. His ballet, “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” was originally a play within a play, part of a Rodgers and Hart Broadway hit, “On Your Toes” from the 1930s. Several decades later Balanchine dusted off his work and expanded it into a stand-alone ballet filled with ladies of easy virtue, silly coppers, sly gangsters and a very deadly competition between two male dancers centering far more on their skill as dancers than any issues of romantic attachment. The real question seems to be, can a great classical dancer become a great hoofer if circumstances demand.

Yep. Especially with a little help from one’s friends, or in this case one Phillip Neil, tap-dancer, former New York City Ballet principal and current South Florida resident. Suddenly — that is after a bit of tutelage — several MCB members  including the great Yann Trividic, become the irrepressible hoofers and jazzistas   “Slaughter” demands. Patricia Delgado, dancing in very high heels, plays the love interest in a climax that could wake the dead.

If all this weren’t enough, on Friday night, the part of gangster gunman will be played by retired Major League Baseball catcher extraordinaire, Mike Piazza. He promises no errors.

Miami City Ballet’s Program IV Broadway and Ballet, Friday and Saturday at 8:00 p.m., Sunday at 2:00 p.m. at the Ziff Ballet Opera House, the Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300  Biscayne Blvd., Miami; tickets range from $20 to $175; www.arshtcenter.org.

This review also appears in Miami New Times.

Photo: Daniel Azoulay

Miami City Ballet closes out the season with Program IV, a combination of Jerome Robbins and George Balanchine with a special guest appearance from baseball great Mike Piazza.

Probably the most predominate need for any choreographer is to find a place to play, create, investigate, but even more important, a place to show their work. From the Works in Progress Series in New York’s Dance Space, or The Shared Choreographer’s Showcase in Cambridge, Mass.’s Dance Complex, or our hometown Open Space series presented by Dance Now Miami at The Little Haiti Cultural Arts Center, studios and more established companies offer a vehicle for other artists to present their work in a lightly produced or bare-bones affair.

One company helping to support other artists is Sobers & Godley, founded in 2009 by Simone Sobers and Gierre Godley to present original contemporary works. In the summer of 2012, the duo founded and produced Dance Soirée in New York City. The mission was to provide an accessible platform for emerging artists to present their work in a raw setting for written feedback from an audience. One choreographer based on audience votes receives an Audience Choice Award honorarium. Showcases take place in the winter, summer, and fall in New York City. And this past weekend, on Sat., April 27, the project’s inaugural spring showcase took place in Miami at the Miami Dance Studio.

Twelve artists, nine local and three from New York, answered the call for work to be presented in this venue. It was standing-room-only, with audience members watching from the back and sides. The magic was the intimate proximity of the artists to the audience, where every nuance and bead of sweat is exposed by two floor stage lamps shining a light against a white wall background. Every piece had the same set up; that one common denominator required that the artists stand out on the merits of their work.

Some were more successful than others.

There were a series of solos which, either by coincidence or design, were all costumed in white, and all seemed to blend into each other. The difficulty of presenting solo work is that unless you have the fortitude and commanding presence of Judith Jameson performing Ailey’s “Cry,” solo work can feel uncomfortably indulgent or overly introspective, trading movement for a highly gesticulated vocabulary. A stand out by merit of its folkloric theme and the dancer’s own enchantment was the ritualistic performance of “Espiritu Shanti,” by Kamaria Dailey.

Highlights of the showcase included Southern Breakdown, a trio by Brigette Cormier, danced by Cormier and two others, dressed in striking red dresses.  The women danced in individual vignettes that moved craftily in and out of unison movement and brought the dancers back to their own starting poses. The movement itself was captivating, but the musical choice of Train Song by Avocado State was distracting. The vocabulary and the interpretation of the space was strong enough that the piece could have worked equally well, if not even more impressively, in silence.

“Consumer,” a spoken word and movement collaboration by writer and spoken word artist Marie Whitman and dancer Paola Escobar, was an intelligent performance piece, where both word and movement reflected and informed each other well. While Escobar danced in, on, and over a rocking chair, Whitman would circle and manipulate the chair while sharing her thoughts on the perils of consumerism. Both women had great presence and Whitman has the rare talent of delivering her engaging words effortlessly, without a hint of hesitation or recitation.

“Beauty of a Woman,” choreographed by Alexandra Makarova, was performed by a quartet of women of varying ages from a young girl to the mature and vibrant Makarova. The piece was a lovely and mesmerizing fusion of contemporary and flamenco. The women danced in canon with the flourishing of fans in hand as they accented the syncopations and rhythms in the soft flamenco guitar music. The movement was rich and flowing but also very physical and challenging.

Also promising was Chad Austin and Shawna Bowden’s quartet, “A Woman’s Story,” whose second section was the strongest danced by four women to a cover of Nina Simone’s often times misunderstood song, Four Women; and Ferdinand de Jesus’ “Bitter Earth,” a duet performed by a powerful couple to Max Richter’s mix of a Dinah Washington standard.  Both pieces had elements that on the surface mildly imitated themes, devices and design of already established works by artists like Ulysses Dove, Talley Beaty, or Alvin Ailey. But at their core was a strong intensity and delivery that as the artists’ future works develop, can grow to an even more powerful original voice.

Even with the diversity of styles mentioned so far, there were two pieces that unfortunately felt out of place. “Fun on a Foggy Day” was a tolerable, decently sung, half jazz dance/half musical number with requisite jazz hands. And “Down on the Pharm” was an overly long costume piece that was heavy on metaphor and light on the tap.

Finally, the bookends of the night were an untitled opening duet by presenters Sobers & Godley that was physical, visceral, and predatory, as the two used the back wall as an extension of their bodies and as the edge of the abyss. The closing piece was Sobers’ creation, danced by the aforementioned Makarova and Claudia Alvarado. The piece titled “About Your Nothing” was a wonderfully dense and at times harrowing pool of movement, with barely a rest for the two strong performers. Whereas many artists confuse emotionally heavy dance interpretation as craft, this work proves that vocabulary, true movement of bodies in space, and genuine craft are more successful at provoking emotions with subtext.

One thing that could benefit the overall experience is curating a smaller number of presenters to eight to 10 (their were 12 works by invited artists and the presenters’ two works). In a showcase of so many styles and artists, reducing the number of works and the length of the showcase would give the audience a better chance to more deeply appreciate each course and rest the palate in between. The selection process would also benefit the program by having a more defined scope. But overall, Miami dance will be better served if such a series continues.

Photo credit: Samantha Siegel

A new performance and theater work from local choreographer and writer Rudi Goblen set in a support-group meeting for the broken-hearted, directed by Michael Yawney, presented by Miami Light Project.

In a single weekend, we will be able to see two of this country’s reputable dance companies, both selecting ballets made in the United States and in a variety of American styles, in one Broward setting.

The Broward Center for the Performing Arts is offering a ticket deal — $99 to see both companies on two separate days. And, like many things American, each of the five ballets delivers a distinctive taste, influenced by a worldly palette. The red hot contemporary Trey McIntyre Project (TMP) will perform three of McIntyre’s ballets, flavored by traditional Basque dancing, Shakespeare and more, Friday and Saturday at the Center’s Amaturo Theater. South Florida’s Miami City Ballet (MCB) will present repertory of George Balanchine, founder of the New York City Ballet (NYCB), and Jerome Robbins, best known for his Broadway choreography, Friday through Sunday at the Au-Rene Theater.

Local dance-goers might already have plans to see MCB, which conducts four programs plus The Nutcracker annually at the Broward Center (it will be in Miami at the Arsht Center May 3 through 5). They might also be familiar with the 10-member TMP, who performed there last year, led by the much sought-after choreographer McIntyre, who has created dances for ballet companies from Moscow to Santiago, New York to Chicago. Seeing both in one weekend, a viewer can observe how choreographers working in the United States have made different soups from the same stock — the stock, in this case, being classical ballet vocabulary.

Dancer Elizabeth Keller embodies many of dance’s histories and experimentations. Born in Dubai to Pittsburgh-native parents, she trained in London at the Royal Academy of Dance and in Houston and Philadelphia. Dancing with MCB for 10 seasons under founder Edward Villella, formerly a leading dancer at NYCB, she absorbed the speed, clarity and precision of Balanchine technique. Earlier, in Pennsylvania, she fell in love with Balanchine’s choreography by working on it with the French ballerina Violette Verdy, Villella’s colleague and one of Keller’s mentors. Keller remembers Verdy describing the circular movement rond de jamb in this appealing way: “Stir, stir the chocolate  fondu. It’s gooey.” A striking movement, frappé, was “sharp, sharp like cheddar cheese.”

Now in her first season with TMP, Keller challenges her ballet-trained body with new tasks. McIntyre’s rigorous choreography includes not only pointe work, but also weighty, grounded movement. Dancers are sometimes called upon to rotate their legs externally, as in ballet, but Keller now must also engage other parts of the body to work in a parallel stance. Additionally, Keller says, McIntyre “encourages us to be present and almost, in a way, vulnerable,” both in the studio and on stage. In rehearsal for Queen of the Goths (2007), loosely based on Titus Andronicus, McIntyre pushed Keller to investigate each moment and detail of choreography — “It has to mean something, it has to cost you something,” she recalls him saying about a series of gestures by her character, Tamora, who unwittingly eats a meat pie made from the remains of two of her slain sons.

MCB’s offering of Balanchine’s burlesque Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (1968), based on the 1936 musical On Your Toes, tells a lighter story. And Robbins’ elegant Dances at a Gathering (1969) depicts human relationships through the physical expression of Chopin’s music. Keller says that, like Robbins, McIntyre encourages his dancers to engage with one another on stage, drawing the audience into their world and stirring their imaginations.

McIntyre’s Pass, Away, commissioned by the Broward Center and premiering this weekend, and Arrantza (2010), join Queen of the Goths on the TMP program.

This is the deal: for $99, you choose one night in an orchestra seat to see TMP, at 7:30 p.m. on Friday or Saturday; one night day or night to see MCB, on Friday at 8:00 p.m., or Saturday and Sunday at either 2:00 or 8:00 p.m. The Broward Center for the Performing Arts, 201 S.W. Fifth Ave., Ft. Lauderdale; for tickets call 954-462-0222.

Photo: MCB’s “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue”; photo: Daniel Azoulay

This also appears with Miami New Times.