by Cynthia Bond Perry | Aug 24, 2010
Atlanta's Dance Canvas, as unstoppable as the emerging choreographers it serves, continues to burst at the seams despite the troubled economy. Expanding programs and new community partnerships have brought new challenges to artistic director Angela Harris, who has just announced the 2010-11 lineup for the group's third annual Fall Performance Series, “Introducing the Next Generation.” Set for November 5 and 6 at the Woodruff Arts Center’s 14th Street Playhouse, the concert will move up to the Main Stage this year; last year’s shows filled Stage 2 beyond capacity.
In keeping with its audience-building mission, the program will comprise about 10 works, “snapshots” of dance styles ranging from contemporary ballet to African-influenced ...
by Cynthia Bond Perry | Aug 13, 2010
Atlanta Ballet opens its new headquarters, the Michael C. Carlos Dance Centre, on Saturday. Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed will preside over a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 10:30 a.m., followed by performances, tours and classes by Atlanta Ballet and several community dance groups Saturday and Sunday. The state-of-the-art facility is located in the trendy, formerly industrial Midtown West neighborhood, an area buzzing with restaurants and theaters.
There’s a feeling of movement and energy flowing down the center’s hallways, and an airy spaciousness beneath its 22-foot ceilings. Warm, natural light filters through its insulating Kalwall exterior panels. Five studios, scenery and costume shops and ample office and meeting space have been ...
by Cynthia Bond Perry | Jul 26, 2010
For Lauri Stallings' gloATL dance troupe, “gaga” is a verb -- an energized way of moving with subtle body awareness. Last Friday and Saturday evenings, 22 dancers gaga-ed through the Woodruff Arts Center’s ivy gardens and across its grassy lawn. Capricious electric currents seemed to zip though their bodies, looping and darting through the air. The lithe figures looked like curious travelers from another world -- different, yet startlingly human. A gloinstallation.
The premiere of “Roem” marked one year since gloATL’s Atlanta debut with “rapt,” a site-specific multimedia work that broke new ground on the Woodruff campus. Since then, Stallings has created 11 new commissions. Five, including “Roem,” were full-length premieres in ...
by Cynthia Bond Perry | Jun 24, 2010
On Sunday, along the tracks of the BeltLine project in the Reynoldstown neighborhood just east of downtown, Brooks and Company Dance will perform "MENT," a site-specific work set on a railroad overpass, a loading dock and an abandoned building in the former industrial district. Live music by violinist Chip Epstein and percussion duo Rhythm Synergy, D’Air Project aerialists, cyclists and graffiti artist Lex Theevilgenius will join the dancers, who’ll appear in body paint, camouflaged onto a graffiti wall.
The company was founded by young choreographer Joanna Brooks, just out of her 20s. She's ambitious, driven and takes her work seriously. A lot of people in town respect her vision ...
by Cynthia Bond Perry | Jun 20, 2010
It takes several months to prepare fewer than seven minutes of choreography in Bala Sarasvati's "Coeur de CORE." Still, young dancers at the University of Georgia have asked to perform it year after year. This Thursday through Saturday, UGA's CORE Concert Dance Company will present the contemporary dance quartet in the Zoetic Dance Exchange Choreographers' Showcase at Atlanta's 7 Stages Theater.
In recent years, Sarasvati, a UGA professor, has given few performances in Atlanta, focusing instead on concerts in Athens and at national and international dance events. But her influence on the Atlanta dance community has remained strong through the artists ...
by Cynthia Bond Perry | Jun 14, 2010
New York -- The walls seemed to shudder during the world premiere of Lauri Stallings' "Halō" in the Duo Multicultural Art Center's jewel-box theater in the East Village here last Thursday. While her dance company, gloATL, performed her latest site-specific work, bits of plaster trickled down behind an antique panel, as if the building's interior was shedding a layer of skin, breathing more easily.
At times, "Halō" echoed the theater’s past, as a 19th-century Belle Epoch-style ballroom and, later, a vaudeville theater where Katherine Dunham and José Limón also appeared. In the late 1960s and ’70s, it was Andy Warhol’s venue for male porn films and productions featuring the ...
