By Merilyn Jackson for The Dance Journal If you’ve ever been to a MiRo Mash-Up, you know that the deal is a weeklong workshop between a local band, a guest artist and the five-member dance group, which then shows what they have made in weekend performance. The company, however, has Un-Mashed its name to spell [...]
By Merilyn Jackson FOR THE INQUIRER “Ties that Bind,” seen at the Painted Bride over the weekend, exemplified, through the choreography of three Philadelphia dance makers, just how this dance community creatively pools its resources. The first two works, by Jennifer Morley and Olive Prince, employed rigging hanging from the fly and told stories, while [...]
By Merilyn Jackson FOR THE INQUIRER What a wonderful thing when a city’s audience base sustains an arts organization for two decades or more. Koresh Dance Company’s 20th anniversary year is upon us, and the company proved that it deserves this longevity with its fall season opener at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre Thursday evening. The [...]
By Merilyn Jackson for The Inquirer BalletX opened its fifth season at the Wilma Theater on Wednesday with a triple bill sparkling with surprising and lovely performances by company newcomers and more-senior members. A new initiative backed by the Knight Foundation and Wells Fargo included intermission entertainment that kept the excitement going. During the first, [...]
By Merilyn Jackson For The Inquirer Philadelphia’s dancers have built a community that’s the envy of other cities around the country. A Washington City Paper article last month cited Headlong Dance Theater as a ringleader, quoting one of its founders, David Brick, as saying, “You have to figure out how to do things on your [...]
By Merilyn Jackson For The Inquirer The Earth goddess of Philadelphia dance, Joan Myers Brown, hurled a thunderbolt of a program at the near-capacity audience in the Kimmel’s Perelman Theater Friday evening – but instead of running for cover, the crowd erupted in cheers as each of the four works ended. It started with a [...]
By Merilyn Jackson, For The Inquirer Artistic director/choreographer Roni Koresh sometimes cherry-picks the best-received sections from his earlier dances, gathers them into a sequence, then gives the whole a title and a vague raison d’etre, as he has with his new Through the Skin. “Don’t intellectualize this dance, feel it viscerally,” he said before Thursday’s [...]
By Merilyn Jackson, FOR THE INQUIRER The backbone of the month-long Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts has been more local than international, with collaborations among many Philadelphia arts groups. Some were unlikely matches and few will live on memorably as great works of art, yet many have resulted in surprisingly high-quality works that made [...]
photo by BRIAN MENGINI Michelle “Crykit” Kolnik (left) and Emiko Sugiyama in Rennie Harris Puremovement’s “Heaven.” The narrative is entwined with the story of “The Rite of Spring,” in which a young virgin is sacrificed. By Merilyn Jackson For The Inquirer Heaven, Rennie Harris Puremovement’s new hip-hop work for the Philadelphia International Festival of the [...]
By Merilyn Jackson For The Inquirer Weather-wise, spring is returning to Philadelphia in fits and starts. But inside the Wilma Theater Wednesday night the stage bloomed with potted flowers, campy song, loopy dance, and ballooning boobies. In Proliferation of the Imagination, a featured event of the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts, those balloons actually [...]
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