Results tagged “dance”

After a flurry of demonstrated community concern, the sale of the Capitol Hill OddFellows building to developer Ted Schroth was finalized in January of 2008, and his company seemed to want to put the whole uncomfortable matter behind them when touting the glorious financial potential of the space:

"The OddFellows Building presented us with an incredible opportunity to restore one of the neighborhood's most cherished icons," said Ted Schroth, the project's developer. "It has been an exciting and rewarding project to be a part of, and we are very excited about the tenants who have already chosen to make the building their home. We are looking forward to finding the right mix of remaining retail and office tenants to share in this remarkable piece of history."

Last weekend marked the halfway point of Spectrum Dance Theater’s Byrd Retrospective Festival - three weekends, nine shows, 16 works. The festival is an earnest reflection on the influence of Artistic Director and choreographer Donald Byrd, who has rapidly raised Spectrum’s status as a serious contemporary dance company since inheriting its direction in 2002.

The first thirty people who donate (make sure you include your email address) to the Velocity Forever Campaign at the $100 level or greater will receive a pair of tickets to the October 23rd Hubbard Street Dance Chicago performance at the Paramount Theater. Ever since skyrocketing rent has forced the modern dance company out of their former home in the OddFellows building, Velocity has been campaigning to raise money for construction of their new dance space a few blocks away on Pine and 12th.

After twenty-five seasons as Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Music Director, Stewart Kershaw tendered his resignation Tuesday in a letter to the company, effective immediately. In his announcement, Kershaw stated, “Please understand that I am now 68, have been a professional ballet conductor for the last 43 years, and recently completed 25 seasons as PNB's Music Director. It is also exactly 20 years since my efforts to create the PNB Orchestra were rewarded in October 1989.”

Odds are there will be thousands of Michael Jacksons crawling the streets this Halloween, so do yourself a favor and up the ante by actually learning some of Jackson's most recognizable choreography, gleaned straight from his music videos. The folks over at Century Ballroom dance studio are teaching a four-week Michael Jackson Tribute class series, covering the moves from Jackson's "Beat It," "The Way You Make Me Feel," "Bad" and "Thriller." (Overachievers: learn how some of the choreography was conceived by listening to NPR's interview with Jeffrey Daniel, who worked with Jackson on the "Bad" and "Smooth Criminal" videos.)

Jessie Smith doesn't fuck around. About two-thirds of the way through Thrashoholic, her endurance piece/spelunking expedition into the psychology of binge drinking, she gives up on interpreting her subject through dance and just pours herself five big shots of Maker's Mark, which she takes in short, painful succession. And lest you think she might be faking, despite breaking the wax seal of the bottle onstage, the smell of what she pukes up (at least the night we saw it, though that outcome seems pretty inevitable) will prove you wrong.

Episode 3 of this season of America's Best Dance Crew was on last night, and this week's challenge was to incorporate martial arts moves into each crew's dance routine. Local b-boys Massive Monkees drew extreme martial arts, a "rapid-fire, acrobatic style of martial art," as opposed to all those slow-moving, really clumsy forms.

On last night's episode of America's Best Dance Crew, Beyonce was there via video to assign each team a song and challenge for their performance. For local crew Massive Monkees, the song was "Work It Out" featuring the use of hula hoops.

Oh, hello America's Best Dance Crew. We're pretty sure we've never watched an entire episode of this MTV "dance" show--that's in quotes because out of the hourlong show, total time devoted to dancing seems to be somewhere around the seven-minute mark. But this season, local breakdancers Massive Monkees are hoping to be the fourth-straight ABDC champions to hail from the West Coast, so we suppose we should say something about it.

HOT NGONI NIGHT: All the way from Mali, ladies and gentlemen, Issa Bagayogo, the international dancefloor sensation! He's touring for his new album Mali Koura, which offers blues, world beat, reggae, funk...a lot of stuff. The mixture of West African music with house music dance tends to knock people over when they hear it. Stylus magazine called his previous album a contender for world music album of the year.

Trinidad Martínez is co-founder of the Magpai Production Group--straight outta Hamburg--and is in the U.S. on a Fullbright. She collaborated with each of the solo performers of Tres Tristes Tigres: Emma Klein, Dayton Allemann, and Jonas Radvik. She's also likely to be the one taking your tickets and offering you a glass of water. But the fringe-theater, many-hats staffing aside, the work you see rivals OtB in its commitment--and shows off Dani Prados' lighting and technical design chops.

Audible, 605 Collective. Hell yeah! After an hour of interpretive dance pieces heavy on long, languid, movements, 605 Collective emerged like an antidote, kicking it up more than a few notches. The five dancers that comprise 605 are electrifying, delivering an athletic, fast-paced, personality-driven snippet from a 60-minute work to debut at the Dancing on the Edge Festival in July. If you live in Vancouver, B.C., don't miss these people. Influenced by everything from hiphop to ballet, they delivered in a stunning way.

Here's a glimpse of last weekend's mainstage works below; the festival closes this weekend at On the Boards with another round of entirely new works. Tickets and info here.

We have come late to the Nadeau appreciation society--after 17 years, that bandwagon has left the station and steamed from the harbor--but it struck us that there was something extraordinary in a 45-year-old ballerina pulling Forsythe's Urlicht out of the hat for a retirement program.

Saturday at five o'clock we went down to On the Boards to catch the first week's Studio Showcase, part of the Northwest New Works Festival. The festival closes up next weekend with entirely different lineups in both the Mainstage and Studio showcases; more info here [PDF]. Tickets $14.

Yesterday, On the Boards announced their next season of shows, and we're excited. OtB is the company we most often recommend to friends, particularly if they're , classic tragedy and issue plays about people coming to terms with things are right up your alley. But a lot of people aren't like that, and for them, the whipsmart contemporary performance at OtB, visually interesting and intellectually stimulating, is going to be a more enjoyable night out, so long as they can get over the initial "it's performance art" thing.

Manifold Motion's ability to work magic with yarn puts to shame all the stitchin', bitchin' hipsters whose facility with knitting needles has never exceeded the ability to make scarves. Part meditation on our hyper-mediated culture, part paean to the arts and crafts movement, Manifold Motion's is a stunningly imaginative dance performance that's more than worth the drive to West Seattle.

Mark Morris's Mozart Dances are performed at the Paramount Theatre tonight at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $35-$75 plus fees.

It feels like the dance event of the year--three performances of Mozart Dances by the Mark Morris Dance Group at the Paramount, this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday (tickets: $35-$75 plus fees). See the preview video here.

One thing about Spectrum Dance Theater's shows is that the dancers have to act fast, and they seem to expect the same of the audience--their "Icono-Clan" show is at the Moore for two shows this weekend, and that's it.

We had to choose just one night of PNB's Swan Lake, and so we went with retiring Louise Nadeau's Odette/Odile--as did as many other people as it takes to fill McCaw Hall. Nadeau and Karel Cruz were everything we wanted: love at first sight's boundary-blurring union of echoing gestures, and then, in a little black dress, Odile's "You want this?" rampage. We ran into a friend, though, who was back for a fourth time, and told us how Jonathan Porretta kept his Jester's schtick evolving from night to night. Check the casting combinations for the six shows left, tonight through Sunday.

GLUTEN FREEDOM: Dr. Stephen Wangen, founder of the IBS Treatment Center, has a new book out called Healthier Without Wheat: A New Understanding of Wheat Allergies, Celiac Disease, and Non-Celiac Gluten Intolerance. As you can tell from the title, his contention is that you don't have to have celiac disease to be gluten intolerant. Personally, we are disturbed by intolerance of any kind, so we are glad to hear that he's working on a cure--what? Just don't eat wheat?

For ballerinas, Swan Lake is a sought-after, tough, and rewarding double role: Odette the good swan and Odile the evil swan. But it all began with the music. In 1875 Tchaikovsky got the commission from the Bolshoi for a full-length ballet based on the Russian folk-tale of an enchanted swan and the handsome prince who falls in love with her; he composed a lush symphonic score that offers choreographers both languid melodic lines and lively melodies. (Familiar plot: boy meets swan, boy betrays and loses swan, swan commits suicide, boy despairs.) The Swan Lake we know today--indeed, the whole notion of ballerina-as-swan (one speaks of "a ballet of swans")--evolved from this specific piece of theater, grounded in the 19th century conventions of classical ballet, with its reliance on a rigid sequence of dances (waltz-solo-march-action scene).

Tomorrow could bring Seattle its next reality TV train wreck star, as the Fox show So You Think You Can Dance holds an open casting call in downtown for all styles of dancers and great performers—bring on the jazz hands--to audition for the show's fifth season. We just have a mean version of “I’m a Little Teapot” in our repertoire so we’ll pass, but if you got rhythm, follow the legwarmers Saturday, March 28, to the Moore Theatre. Doors open at 8 a.m. Break a leg, Seattle!

DOWN ON THE CORNER: The Corner, our favorite one monthly live hiphop night down at the Rendezvous, has its one-year anniversary tonight. (Already?!) As usual, Oldominioner Candidt has put together a stellar line-up: JFK of Grayskul, Silent Lambs Project with Lisa Loud, and UW reps Rudy & The Rhetoric; he'll also throw in a set of his own. So solid. We've been looking forward to this for months now!

       

PNB's exuberant festival hits you with what you've been missing--the panache of feeling good and knowing it. Before each ballet in its Broadway Festival (through March 22, tickets $25-$160), Pacific Northwest Ballet rolls a clip--for Jerome Robbins' West Side Story Suite it was a trailer for the West Side Story movie. As the Jets began snapping their fingers, the audience in McCaw Hall snapped theirs right back. No laughter, just snap...snap...snap.

       

There was some excitement on the street before Lykke Li took the stage for a full house at the Showbox, so maybe that's why we felt out of sync with the slow-boil, drum-and-bass(ish) start to the concert. We'd wondered how Lykke Li would take to headlining at such a large venue, and the answer was stark shafts of light, atmospheric smoke, and a heavy hand on the bass end of the soundboard. It was miles away from the Swedish pop songbird we'd seen at the Triple Door in May of last year, but it grew on us, hearing the fierce, sweet, ear-candling pop lyrics of "Little Bit" and "Tonight" lofted over over a booming cataract of drums--and seeing a whole roomful of Seattle concertgoers dancing. Meanwhile, Lykke Li dervished her way around the stage, alternating between staring off with soulful eyes and brandishing various sticks at the cymbals, band, and anyone else who might have needed a little kick in the pants. She's touring with a set drawn from her album Youth Novels, which we have yet to grow tired of hearing--it's bracing to hear a twenty-something writing lyrics so idiosyncratically well in, for her, a foreign language. Even at the back the conversational rumble would die down, everyone's eyes glued to the stage, the Showbox's many bartenders with nothing to do but run a cloth over the bar until the next song ended.

Virtually all dance performance is, in one way or another, an exploration of the human body: the dancers are lithe and athletic--look at the movement, the balance, the elegant contortions that the body, fine-tuned as an instrument, is capable of! But Portland's tEEth (at On the Boards tonight and tomorrow at 8 p.m., $18), in their world-premiere work , have another way to explore the body: through sound.

ZIPCAR OPEN HOUSE: Drop in at the grand opening of an actual downtown office for Zipcar--in the old Dept. of Licensing location at 3rd and Union. The open house runs until 5 p.m., and if you stop in and join Zipcar today, there's no annual fee for your first year. We're told there's also a prize wheel where you can win driving credits and other goodies, plus free snacks. We use the Zipcar ourselves, and we're happy to hear that the City of Seattle is joining them in a car-sharing arrangement for city employees.

Before we even start getting into the coolness of chelfitsch's performance last weekend at On the Boards, we need to apologize for something: We try to make sure to let readers know about events in time to get tickets, but for the second time this season, OtB sold out before we started plugging. This is their 30th anniversary season, and the line-up has really rocked, so consider this your notice for the month.