9/22/17 O&A Shall We Dance: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers – Top Hat

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Top Hat was the most successful picture of Astaire and Rogers’ partnership (and Astaire’s second most successful picture after Easter Parade), achieving second place in worldwide box-office receipts for 1935. While some dance critics maintain that Swing Time contained a finer set of dances, Top Hat remains, to this day, the partnership’s best-known work. Continue reading

Litefeet: Sound of the Subway’ Is a Documentary on New York’s Underground Music and Dance

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Litefeet is a rising music genre and style of dance that has become increasingly popular within the New York subway scene.  The genre is highlighted by 100-BPM tracks as well as an acrobatic take on old school b-boy moves and pop-locking. Due to the energetic nature of the music and the moves, police have begun cracking down on the scene, leaving artists sometimes struggling to cope. Continue reading

6/5/15 O&A Shall We Dance- A Tribute To Dudley Williams: A Song For You (1986)

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In 1972, Alvin Ailey created the elegiac solo Love Songs for dancer Dudley Williams. The  sixteen minute solo, composed in three sections includes A Song for You by Donny Hathaway; Poppies by Nina Simone; and He Ain’t Heavy, He’s my Brother by Donny Hathaway. Many  thought of the work as the male equivalent of the female solo Cry (1971). Continue reading

5/28/2015 Shall We Dance Friday: NextLevel Squad

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Next Level Squad, a Brooklyn-based group of élite dancers who specialize in Bone Breaking.  The dance style has roots, as a technique, in flexing; but in recent years it has flourished as its own distinct dance form. Next Level Squad has not only brought Bone Breaking to the attention of the urban public, it has gained an international following. Another art-form “Made In America”. Continue reading

5/22/15 O&A Shall We Dance Friday: Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux – Patricia McBride and Mikhail Baryshnikov

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Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux with Patricia McBride and Mikhail Baryshnikov was recorded in 1979. George Balanchine acquired the rights to the music in 1953 and he used it to devise a party piece for a principal couple, amending the choreography each time to suit each pair of dancers. You have to admire Patricia McBride’s diamond-edged footwork including entrechats skimmed millimetres from the floor, or wonder how Baryshnikov’s twelfth consecutive double cabriole can look as easy and elegant as the first.  Continue reading

5/15/15 O&A Shall We Dance Friday: 5 Incredible Argentine Tango Performances

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Lots can be said about performance tango but I am a lot more of a milonga kind-of-guy. Milongas are social dance parties at the dance halls that are less formal, less rigid, and much more nuanced by the small dance floors and relationships that form. Milongas are a place to find “under the radar” performance gems. Here are my top 5 picks of the best Argentine Tango performances at milongas in 2014 (new rankings based on viewers’ choice):

1. Chicho Frumboli & Juana Sepulveda Performing at Dance Manhattan (NYC)
                                                                                                                                                                                                               

2. Ismael Ludman & Maria Mondino at Timisoara Tango Story (Timisoara, Romania)

3. Michael Nadtochi & Eleanora Kalganova at Prischepov Milonga (Russia,Moscow)

4. Gustavo Naveira & Giselle Anne – The Great Milonga at Goldcoast Ballroom (Coconut Creek, FL)

5. Claudio Gonzalez & Melina Brufman – Milonga Apertura at Rosario Tango Festival (Rosario, Argentina)

Written by Vlad Shifrin for Danceus.org

 

 

5/1/15 O&A Shall We Dance Friday- Encore Performance: Le jeune homme et la mort by Roland Petit (Zizi Jeanmaire & Rudolf Nureyev)- 1966

ENCORE

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Le Jeune Homme et La Mort was choreographed by Roland Petit  choreographed in 1946 to Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 582, with a one-act libretto by Jean Cocteau. It tells the story of a Young Man driven to suicide by his faithless lover. Sets were by George Wakhevitch and costumes variously reported as being by Karinska or Cocteau. Continue reading

4/21/15 Shall We Dance Friday: Maya Angelou’s Harlem Hopscotch: Official Music Video

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The official music video for Dr. Maya Angelou’s Harlem Hopscotch. Dr. Angelou’s inspiring song is featured on the newly released album Caged Bird Songs, produced RoccStar and Shawn Rivera by of the R&B vocal pop group Az Yet. The song is about encouraging everyone, especially young people to persevere through life despite any obstacles!  Continue reading

4/10/15 O&A Shall We Dance Friday: Lady of the Camellias – Marcia Haydee & Ivan Liska (1986)

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Lady of the Camellias is a ballet by John Neumeier with music by Frédéric Chopin, created for Marcia Haydée, then prima ballerina of the Stuttgart Ballet. It premiered at the Staatstheater Stuttgart in 1978. The theme of The Lady of the Camellias is a love story between Marguerite Gautier, a “demi-mondaine” (“courtisane” in the original French, i.e., a woman “kept” by various lovers, frequently more than one at a time) suffering from tuberculosis, and a young provincial bourgeois, Armand Duval.  Continue reading

Shall We Dance Friday: Bad Blood by Ulysses Dove

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Bad Blood received its World Premiere, in 1984 on Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal. Featuring music by Laurie Anderson (Gravity’s Angel and Walking and Falling) and Peter Gabriel (Excellent Birds) the work in an erotic tour de force battle of the sexes. The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre premiered the work in 1986. It is one of seven Dove ballets in the Ailey Company repertoire.  Continue reading