By Merilyn Jackson For The Inquirer No matter how great the choreography, without the right dancers to breathe life into it, a dance can go flat as a souffle when the oven door is opened too soon. No worries at the Wilma Theater Wednesday night when BalletX opened its summer run. All 10 of the [...]

By Merilyn Jackson, For The Inquirer In the Philadelphia/Washington D.C. Exchange concert over the weekend, Anne-Marie Mulgrew and Dancers Company joined with D.C.’s Human Landscape Dance, each presenting two works representative of their companies. Both have a reputation for working in site-specific arenas, each well-known for using parks, walls, even city sidewalks to create a [...]

By Merilyn Jackson For The Inquirer Before funders bowed to political pressure in the 1980s, they allowed grantees full artistic expression. You still see funder-driven work in the theater realm. But Terri Shockley, executive director of the 25-year-old Community Education Center, has valiantly given Philadelphia’s dance artists a safe place to take non-funded risks and [...]

By Merilyn Jackson for The Dance Journal Judith Jamison’s life began 66 years ago in West Philadelphia at The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.  She wasted no time turning it into a long and storied career as one of America’s most beloved dance artists, discovered by Agnes de Mille, who gave her her first [...]

By Merilyn Jackson,  For The Inquirer Once in a while a dance leaves you breathless the instant it begins. That happened Friday night at the Community Education Center (CEC) with dancer/choreographer Nora Gibson’s work for four dancers, Vested Souls. From the first sweep of Michael Reiley McDermott’s electronic score to the last sweep of Eiren [...]

By Merilyn Jackson for the Inquirer. Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers opened their second engagement at the Painted Bride Thursday night, once again to a sellout crowd. Not surprising as this small company, in just a few years since its move from New York, is at the pinnacle of Philadelphia’s outstanding dance community. The program, called Autumn Skin: [...]

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 video [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]