DANCE & MORE FOR $1.98 at MoMing Dance & Arts Center July 8, 9, and 10 The dancers featured on the first weekend of MoMing’s annual “Dance & More for $1.98” seemed to answer the call, “Tell me a story.” Dance, ways of moving, was not the focus of most of the six works. Two […]
Author Archives: Sarah Kaufman
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Momix With Shadowfax
MOMIX WITH SHADOWFAX Auditorium Theatre June 10 With a dance-theater company like Connecticut-based Momix, once you’ve seen their imaginative and whimsical tricks, you seek them out again and again, as an addict seeks the assured immediate pleasures of his drug. The dancers have many sleights of hand (and foot) to offer, dancing on stilts or […]
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Rehearsal
The premiere performance of Ballet Chicago was a colossal production; it consisted of nine ballets, four of them performed by guest artists who arrived in town only the day before the event. The single rehearsal that preceded it, uniting for the first time all the dancers, costumes, and music, was hardly a graceful undertaking. It […]
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Weave of Ages
LIZ LERMAN AND THE DANCE EXCHANGE at MoMing Dance & Arts Center May 12-15 We’re not used to seeing little old ladies adored by attractive young men, but that’s how Liz Lerman sees them. At least, in part. In a section called “War Bride: When It Was Good” from the multifaceted Sketches From Memory, a […]
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Chi-Town Jazz Dance
CHI-TOWN JAZZ DANCE at Centre East May 7, 1988 Chi-Town Jazz Dance, which boasts of being Chicago’s newest jazz dance company–it was formed in 1983–affirmed its novelty Saturday in a program in which the seven company members seemed at times to have all the sobriety of cheerleaders. Although technically unspectacular, the troupe was decidedly fresh, […]
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Dancing to the New Music
DANCING TO THE NEW MUSIC at MoMing Dance & Arts Center April 15-16, 1988 In its most potent form, a collaboration between composer and choreographer infuses a work with a double charge. Such joint ventures have produced some of the richest ballet and modern dance works of all time. The Marius Petipa-Pyotr Tchaikovsky union begat […]
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Cleveland San Jose Ballet
CLEVELAND SAN JOSE BALLET at the Civic Center for Performing Arts April 6-10 and 12-16 The Cleveland San Jose Ballet’s full-length Romeo and Juliet incorporated two of the most damnable faults a performance can bear: the attempt to distract from bad dancing with stunning sets, and the presentation of characters so unsympathetic that we ultimately […]
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Pilobolus Growing
PILOBOLUS DANCE THEATRE at the Auditorium Theatre March 18-20 In 1971 four men, Dartmouth classmates who had all taken dance workshops with Alison Chase, found they had in common a dry wit and a fascination with the sculptural possibilities of the human anatomy. The group they formed then–Pilobolus, also the name of a fungus–often performed […]