Archive for the 'Dance' Category

The Billy Rose Garden in Jerusalem – Isamu Noguchi

Friday, November 16th, 2012
  • Dome

    Noguchi Garden
    in Jerusalem <>

    ( Photos by Fung-Lin Hall taken from the Billy Rose Garden in Jerusalem)

  • Isamu Noguchi – Nov 17, 1904

  • (image via)

    This set by acclaimed designer Isamu Noguchi, used in Martha Graham’s ‘Embattled Garden,’ was damaged when basement storage of the Martha Graham Dance Company, located in the West Village, flooded in late October 2012. The company said it is still assessing the extent of the damage.

    See Isamu Noguchi design from The Appalachian Spring..

  • Noguchi Museum NY..(youtube)

  • Yoshiko Yoshiko Yamaguchi and Isamu Noguchi and Isamu Noguchi
    Yoshiko Yamaguchi – Isamu Noguchi’s ex-wife .. an international diva who became a politican and has become a passionate advocate for Palestinian causes.

  • Edward Said on Israel occupation (youtube)

  • Orange Dance & Tyrannosaur

    Friday, November 2nd, 2012

    <>
    (Thanks to Mirjam Wildner)

    After being invited by Benjamin Millepied to a rehearsal for the L.A Dance Project’s premiere performance, Oscar-nominated director Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Biutiful (2010), Babel (2006)) was inspired to make a video-exercise that documents movement and dance in an experimental way, with a stream of consciousness narrative. The result is NARAN JA (One Act Orange Dance).(The Creators’ Project)

    Benjamin Millepied is married to Natalie Portman.

  • Image via

    <>

    Paddy Considine On Asperger’s Syndrome, BBC Radio Dec 2011

    Happy birthday Peter Mullan

    Peter Mullan directed Magdalene Sisters (Joni Mitchell dedicated the song – previous post).

    Peter Mullan was in Young Adam

    Pina

    Thursday, July 26th, 2012
  • 1aahnen-man-mike-woman-horizontal-chair_1000

  • Sarang is a Korean song.

  • Pina and Ronald Kay (her husband – photo via)

    Pina Bausch was born on 27 July 1940.

    See more from Pina Bausch Archive.

    Maurice Sendak and Pilobolus – The Last Dance

    Wednesday, May 9th, 2012

  • Pilobolus & Maurice Sendak

    In 1999 the dance troupe teamed up with a pair of unlikely collaborators: Maurice Sendak and opera director Arthur Yorinks. It was the first time Pilobolus had allowed outsiders to contribute to their unique process, and the result was a dark and masterful rumination on the Holocaust called A Selection. While the end result may have been a brilliant success, the journey to that point was awkward and contentious, to say the least. Mirra Bank’s 2002 documentary Last Dance provides an intimate look at the backstage drama, the dance’s evolution, and Sendak’s imagination at work.

    And this is where I think Sendak and Pilobolus finally found their common ground: in a form—the human body or a picture book—so seemingly humble and quiet, but so ready to explode emotionally. As Sendak says in “Last Dance”: “You make the whole thing up anyway. You sit there, they sit there, we’re all making it up…. So if you’re making it up, make it up good.” (Via)

    R.I.P Maurice Bernard Sendak – (June 10, 1928 – May 8, 2012)

  • TELL THEM ANYTHING YOU WANT: A PORTRAIT OF MAURICE SENDAK 2009 directed by Lance Bangs, Spike Jonze.

  • Maurice Sendak’s Opera inspired drawings here.

    Dance, Dance Otherwise We’re Lost

    Monday, May 7th, 2012

    Dance, Dance Otherwise We’re Lost

  • Pina by Wim Wenders

    Saturday, August 13th, 2011

    Wim Wim-Wenders-with-Pina-Bau-002 and Pina

    Happy birthday Wim Wenders!

    What I saw there, moved me deeply.
    I troubled me, amazed me, but most of all: it concerned me.
    What I had thought impossible – in the context of dance –
    had happened!
    This spoke to me in a very powerful way.

    When the piece was over,
    – it only lasted 40 minutes,
    but it felt like I had visited a whole universe –
    I realized that this (unknown) woman Pina Bausch
    had shown me more about men and women
    then the entire history of cinema had.
    And all that without a word,
    with nothing but movement, body language and dancing.
    I might be exaggerating a bit,
    and the history of cinema has a lot to offer
    about the relations between men and women,
    but that’s how it felt: mind-blowing.

    Wim Wenders speaks about her death (Youtube)

  • Tsuyoshi Shirai – Dance/Visual from Japan

    Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011

    Wani Ballet (Crocodille Ballet)

    See Theco (youtube dance clip by Tsuyoshi Shirai)

    The Dancer 1Tsuyoshi Shirai- (via Shift)

    Interview with Tsuyoshi Shirai

    TSUYOSHI SHIRAI is a dancer, choreographer and founder of the Contemporary Dance Group daneto, which performs dance, music and video works. The groups performances, which feature collaboration with contemporary music and a wide range of artists, have been well received both at home and abroad.
    In 2004, Shirai performed the solo work “mass, slide, &.” In 2011, he created and presented a new visual work based on “mass, slide, &.” called “mass, slide, &. in frames” at YCAM. He has been trying many new things not only showing his visual works on the web but also make all materials downloadable. He describes this new creation as “dance as a visual work.” We asked Shirai to explain his views on the difference between theatrical and video works.

    R.I.P Jill Johnston

    Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

    Jill Johnston 1JOHNSTON-obit-popup May 17, 1929 – September 18, 2010
    (author and critic)
    NYtimes obit

    Ms. Johnston started out as a dance critic, but in the pages of The Voice, which hired her in 1959, she embraced the avant-garde as a whole, including happenings and multimedia events.

    Ms. Johnston continued to write on the arts but took a strong political line with a marked psychoanalytic slant evident in “Jasper Johns: Privileged Information” (1996), which explored the artist’s works as a series of evasions and subterfuges rooted in conflict about his homosexuality, and in the two volumes of her memoirs: “Mother Bound” (1983) and “Paper Daughter” (1985), both of them subtitled “Autobiography in Search of a Father.” (NYtimes obit)

    [Paper Daughter] is a joy To be sane about insanity is the neatest trick in anybody’s book, and Jill Johnston’s has it.
    Peter Schjeldahl

    Thespian lemonist, dance cricket, and irrepressible funster…(Vancouver Observer Obit)

    Feisty, irreverent, difficult, incomprehensible, surreal, as one critic put it, she was “part Gertrude Stein, part E. E. Cummings, with a dash of Jack Kerouac thrown for good measure.”

    Book on Jasper Johns.1JilljasperPg-JJ-10

    Magill Book Reviews for EBSCO Publishing
    In her book on Jasper Johns, Jill Johnston combines a superb background in art history with a penetrating understanding of the artists psychology. As Dr. Samuel Johnson said, the biographers first obligation is to the truth. Of course, the biographer must be tactful and subtle qualities that Johnston exhibits on every page of her fine book.
    Carl Rollyson

    Jill and Dick Cavett 1JillandCavet

    Throughout her childhood she believed that her parents had divorced, but in 1950, when The New York Times ran a short obituary about her father, an English bell maker named Cyril F. Johnston, she learned the truth.

    Her mother informed her that she and Johnston had never married. A lifelong fascination with this absent figure, whose company, Gillett & Johnston, supplied bells and carillons to churches and cathedrals all over the world, motivated her to write “England’s Child: The Carillon and the Casting of Big Bells” (2008), a biography of her father and a history of bell making.

    Jill Johnston (wiki)

    Johnston’s most recent writing March 2010

    Jill Johnston (Huffpost)

    Jill Johnston On Palin: Little More Than A Smokescreen

    Jill Johnston on “Life” Jan 1, 1971

    Columnist Jill Johnston who recently announced her lesbianism in dance column of THE VILLAGE VOICE.

    Kazuo Ohno R.I.P

    Friday, June 4th, 2010


    (photograph by Eiko Hosoe)

    A tribute to Ohno

    Ohno at 95 years (Adagio Samuel Barber)
    Ohno kazuo_ohno October 27, 1906 – June 1, 2010

    Kazuo kazuoOhno Ohno

    NYtimes Obit Kazuo Ohno a Founder of Japanese Butoh, Dies at 103

    Kazuo Ohno, a founder of Butoh, the influential Japanese dance-theater form whose traditional look of darkness and decay evoked for many the horrors of the wartime bombings of Japan, died on Tuesday in Yokohama, Japan. He was 103 and had continued to perform beyond his 100th year.

    Obit from Times online (Ohno’s first performance was at an advanced age of 47 years)

    A short clip of Ohno dancing while sitting on his chair

    Kazuo Ohno Studio

    On the verge of death one revisits the joyful moments of a lifetime. One’s eyes are opened wide-gazing into the palm, seeing death, life, joy and sorrow with a sense of tranquillity.”

    Mikhail Baryshnikov & Cesc Gelabert

    Saturday, December 12th, 2009

  • Who is Cesc Gelabert ?

  • Sense Fi 2009

    An extract from one of the last two works of the Company. Choreography: Cesc Gelabert Comissioned score: Pascal Comelade. Costumes:L.Azzopardi

    Jean Philippe Rameau

    Friday, September 25th, 2009

    J.P. Rameau

    Les Paladins

    Jean-Philippe Rameau (September 25, 1683 – September 12, 1764) was one of the most important French composers and music theorists of the Baroque era.

    Les Boréades, Eros

    Director Robert Carsen and his creative team flood the stage with summer blossoms, drifts of autumn leaves, winter snows and thunderous spring storms. The cast of 140 are attired in elegant costumes inspired by late 1940s Dior. This mythical tale of a young queen, Alphise, determined to abdicate rather than contemplate an enforced marriage to a descendant of Boreas, is nothing less than highly-charged.
    Ground-breaking modern dance ensemble La La La Human Steps, choreographed by Édouard Lock, perform dance ‘divertissements’ in this strikingly beautiful staging.

    Sylvie Guillem selected la Poule for you.

    Agnes de Mille

    Friday, September 18th, 2009

    Agnes de Mille agnesbio
    (18 September 1905 – 7 October 1993) was an American dancer and choreographer

    When Agnes was very young, her father followed his brother, Cecil B. de Mille to California, to try for work in the new gold field of motion pictures. He went for a year’s stay and remained for the rest of his life. (Her bio here)

    Her autograph agnes4

    Oklahoma ! – Out Of My Dreams (Part 2)

  • Theater people are always pining and agonizing because they’re afraid that they’ll be forgotten. And in America they’re quite right. They will be.
    Agnes de Mille
  • To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking.
    Agnes de Mille
  • Agnes de Mille’s career was a long, successful, but also turbulent journey through the world of 20th century American theater and ballet (via)

    W/Thanks to Steven Schwartz!