12/31/21 O&A NYC Shall We Dance Friday (Repost): Banda (excerpt)- Geoffrey Holder and Carmen de Lavallade

Shall We Dance

safe_image.php

Geoffrey Holder’s Banda dance debuted in the 1954 Truman Capote/Harold Arlen musical House Of Flowers. Holder the Baron of The Cemetery (based on the Haitian Loa of Death Baron Samedi) and received both a performer and choreographer credit in the program. The Broadway musical takes place somewhere in the West Indies during Mardi Gras weekend. Continue reading

10/11/24 O&A SHALL WE DANCE FRIDAY: The Fountain of Bakhchisarai Starring Galina Ulanova and Maya Plisetskaya

Shall We Dance Friday

pliset04

The Fountain of Bakhchisarai (Russian: Бахчисарайский фонтан) is a Russian ballet inspired by the 1823 poem by Alexander Pushkin of the same title. With music by Boris Asafyev and choreography by Rostislav Zakharov, the ballet premiered in Saint Petersburg, (then Leningrad) in 1934 at the Kirov Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet (now the Mariinsky Theatre). Continue reading

The World According To Sidra Bell

By Walter Rutledge

10277492_10154107187395580_4753469105616061906_n

Sidra Bell Dance New York presented the New York premiere of garment Thursday May 15 at the Baruch College Performance Arts Center.  The work by choreographer Sidra Bell had a running time of 60 minutes without an intermission. In many situations a protracted work of this length would have been an intolerable dirge, whose only redeeming quality was that it allowed the audience a short early evening nap. But this was the world according to Sidra Bell, and in her environmental fantasy fest we were on a non-stop roll coaster ride of subliminal and metaphoric imagery. Continue reading

(Repost) 4/1/14 O&A NYC DANCE: Martha Graham – Appalachian Spring and Rite of Spring

By Walter Rutledge

appalachian-spring

The recent all too-short season of the Martha Graham Dance Company at New York City Center was a resounding artistic success. The company performed two programs of Graham classics and stunning new works by Nacho Duato and Andonis Foniadakis. The Saturday March 22 evening program included two Graham classics Appalachian Spring (1944) and Rite of Spring (1984).  Both works reinforced the fact that Graham was not only as a master craftsman, but also as an artist with a strong sense of classic form, structure and design. Continue reading