By Merilyn Jackson | For The Inquirer
This year’s installment of Philadelphia Dance Projects Presents opened Friday night with part one of the Local Dance History Project/Next Up series, tracking the city’s dance past into the future – what was, who was, what will be, and who will be dancing it.
In a preshow [...]

By Merilyn Jackson, For The Inquirer
The nEW Festival’s public stage performances launched Wednesday night at the Drake Theater with two programs, displays of brilliant dancing and a strong array of interpretations of a single work.
Share, a witty dance-theater piece loosely based on the notions of truth and falsity by Philadelphia’s Gabrielle Revlock, led off the [...]

By Merilyn Jackson, For The Inquirer
“Dance-driven” nEW Festival opens.

Good dance just keeps sweeping into Philadelphia – and sweeping us off our feet (or onto them; see below). This week it’s the nEW Festival, Melanie Stewart’s now-six-year-old brainchild. What began as an artists’ cooperative with workshops and classes for dancers at the University of the Arts [...]

By Merilyn Jackson, For The Inquirer
If you’ve ever preserved lemons, snorted a saline solution, scoured your black spider skillet with kosher salt, or just salted something away, you know how quotidian salt is – your salary is even named after it. You use it, say it, ingest it, avoid it, and think about it, often [...]

By Merilyn Jackson, For The Inquirer
Einstein described quantum particles as “spooky action at a distance,” and the behavior of particles and waves and their relationship forever perplexed him. When dancer-choreographer Amanda Miller and filmmaker-videographer Tobin Rothlein wanted to explore the same scientific phenomenon through dance, theater technology, and romantic relationships, they had a universe of [...]

By Merilyn Jackson, For The Inquirer
Philadelphia hosts a redoubtable legion of dance-makers. Over the weekend, amid a swirl of other dance activity, Eleone Dance Theatre was onstage at North Broad Street’s Freedom Theater, while across town the Painted Bride hosted Tania Isaac, Gabri Christa, and Marianela Boan.
At 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, Eleone held [...]

Martha Clarke’s sinister “Sandman” creeps in to Phila. starting tomorrow.
By Merilyn Jackson, For The Inquirer
As the early-April closing of her New York hit Garden of Earthly Delights loomed, choreographer/director Martha Clarke was bringing a new work to life in Philadelphia with Jeanne Ruddy Dance.
Clarke’s Sandman is the last piece in Ruddy’s three-year guest-choreographer project (the [...]

By Merilyn Jackson. For The Inquirer
The 16 dance numbers in the 2009 Garden State Dance Festival’s two-weekend run at Rutgers-Camden’s Walter K. Gordon Theater offer a kaleidoscopic glimpse of what emerging dancers can do when matched with established choreographers. Several of the works in last weekend’s opener were highly polished, mobile – and as colorful [...]

By Merilyn Jackson
For The Inquirer
Sitting across from the respectably gray-suited F. Randolph “Randy” Swartz in his Bridesburg office, you might not guess that an engaging and adventurous spirit lies within. But Swartz, founder and executive director of the Dance Celebration Series at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center, has traveled a number of roads in [...]

By Merilyn Jackson
For The Inquirer
Group Motion’s 40th Anniversary show at the Painted Bride last weekend – a low-key event called “Shadow and Light” – bookended three modest dances with lovely receptions that gave longtime fans a chance to celebrate and reminisce about the company’s impact on the dance scene in the South Street community and [...]