By Ellen Dunkel, For The Inquirer The Pennsylvania Ballet opens its season with the company premiere of Roland Petit’s tale of the Gypsy girl. There’s sex, jealousy, a wild bar scene – and murder. The dancers smoke on stage, clap rhythmically, snap their fingers to the music, even chant. They wear bright costumes, wigs, and [...]
By Ellen Dunkel for the Inquirer Avatar has been a smash, breaking new technological ground (as well as box office records). Avatard, on the other hand, is more retro, revisiting a time of clunky video games. A modern dance created last year by Philadelphia-based dancer-choreographer Megan Mazarick and performed Friday night at Temple’s Conwell Dance [...]
By Ellen Dunkel | For The Inquirer Pennsylvania Ballet brings back Matthew Neenan’s “Carmina Burana” and shows off new dancers, new energy. Pennsylvania Ballet premiered Matthew Neenan’s Carmina Burana at the Academy of Music in March 2007 to great fanfare, then took it to New York’s City Center, then packed it away. It hadn’t been [...]
By Ellen Dunkel For The Inquirer A dancer’s body is his instrument. That’s especially true for the performers of New Zealand’s Black Grace, whose bodies double as percussion instruments. The seven short pieces on the program, which opened Friday night at the Kimmel Center’s Perelman Theater, were all choreographed by the company’s founder and artistic [...]
By Ellen Dunkel For The Inquirer Sometimes it’s not just what happens on stage that makes a performance, but the surrounding details as well. When Brooklyn’s Urban Bush Women, with Germaine Acogny and Kaolack (Pape Ibrahima Ndiaya), danced a single performance at Goodhart Hall at Bryn Mawr College’s Saturday night, it was a meeting of [...]
By Ellen Dunkel, For The Inquirer Not everything went swimmingly when the dance troupe BodyVox opened Water Bodies at the Annenberg’s Zellerbach Theatre on Thursday night. There were technical difficulties and mistakes nearly from the start: Video wouldn’t play; sound volume and quality were inconsistent; dancers missed steps. But the Portland, Ore., group’s suite of [...]
By Ellen Dunkel, For The Inquirer On its own, Le Baiser Inevitable, the new ballet Jodie Gates choreographed for BalletX, is visually compelling, powerful, beautiful. But there’s no getting around the fact that it was set to Ravel’s Bolero, an extremely well-known piece of music that is loaded with sensuality, emotion and expectations – in [...]
Once upon a time, the wind blew a picture of a ballerina to an orphan’s gate in Africa . . . By Ellen Dunkel, For The Inquirer The road to becoming a dancer, particularly for a girl, is a long, hard, highly competitive one. She must practice thousands of pliés and tendus, and deal with [...]
By Ellen Dunkel, For The Inquirer Do people ever really change? Observers from psychologists to advice columnists have weighed in on that question. Now, let’s hear from a choreographer. “In 3,000 years, nothing has changed,” asserts Ronen “Roni” Koresh, who, as director of his eponymous dance company, turns social commentary into movement. “Go to a [...]
By Ellen Dunkel, For The Inquirer The sun had just set. The wind sure did bite. We went to the theater that blustery night. All we could do was to sit, sit, sit, sit. But we were rewarded with a charming little hit. Saturday night at the Wilma Theater BalletX premiered The Striped Hat, co-artistic [...]
