ArtsCriticATL.com

What’s surprising about the Atlanta dance scene is the number of choreographers who produce interesting, engaging contemporary work. On Saturday evening, the Modern Atlanta Dance Festival showcased seven of those voices in its annual concert at the Marcus Jewish Community Center.

It’s been 15 years since festival artistic director and curator Douglas Scott, seeing the demise of the juried Atlanta Dance on the Loose Festival, decided to start the MAD festival. To pay for the concert’s first venue, Scott worked at Agnes Scott College as an adjunct instructor, giving up a semester’s wages to cover the college theater’s rental costs.

Around that time…

DanceATL, a dance service organization for metro Atlanta, made its debut Sunday evening at the Park Tavern with the first of a series of bi-monthly community dance events. Held in conjunction with Atlanta Ballet’s Barre2Bar social mixer, the fledgling support group hosted a panel discussion led by three distinctly different dance community leaders: Atlanta Ballet artistic director John McFall, CORE Performance Company artistic director Sue Schroeder and Pilobolus creative director Matt Kent.

[/caption]

After a…

Lauri Stallings’ gloATL has gone public. Not on the stock exchange, but in Atlanta’s heavily trafficked Lenox Square mall, where the new nonprofit arts organization Flux Projects presented “Bloom” over Valentine’s Day weekend.

In the new site-specific work, internationally noted choreographer Stallings, based in Atlanta, collaborated with Sonic Generator’s Tom Sherwood and Brad Ritchie, accordion player Don Discenza and poet Big Rube of the OutKast/Dungeon family. The imaginatively rich, emotionally compelling “Bloom” bravely thrust Flux Projects toward its primary aims — to bring diverse, high-quality artworks to Atlanta’s public spaces, to attract new audiences to the arts and ultimately to increase…

In rehearsal with Lauri Stallings’ gloATL last week, a flock of dancers draped in layers gradually filled the 14th Street Playhouse stage while Ravel’s “Bolero” gathered force. They were rehearsing “bloom,” a site-specific work that will premiere this weekend at Lenox Square mall.

“bloom” will launch Flux Projects, a new nonprofit arts organization devoted to the creation of artworks around metro Atlanta outside of traditional arts venues. (Read Catherine Fox’s ArtsCriticATL story about Flux Projects.) With music by Sonic Generator and def poetry by Big Rube, “bloom” will open Friday evening at 7 and run through the weekend, Saturday and Sunday at 4…

When you think of the ballet “Cinderella,” based on Charles Perrault’s classic fairy tale, you may envision a poor but virtuous girl transformed into a prince’s bride, pumpkin and mice changed into a coach and horses, a benevolent fairy godmother and comical ugly stepsisters performed by men in travesty.

Atlanta Ballet‘s new production of “Cinderella” has all of that. Top that with the stage debut of artistic director and choreographer John McFall’s 5-year-old daughter, Stella Blue, and you have an outing made for the kids. The production opened last night at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre and will run through Feb…

The hips drop, and an impulse shoots through the torso, rippling out through a reaching arm. Sensations and emotions surge through the body, concentrated into a sense of humanness that urgently needs to be felt and expressed.

The exquisitely trained, articulate dancers of Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet will bring the racing fluidity, vulnerability and intensity of Ohad Naharin’s choreography with “an intimate look at Ohad Naharin’s ‘Decadance 2007.’ ” The informal performance will be held in the Dance Studio at Emory’s Schwartz Center for Performing Arts Feb. 24-26 at 8 p.m. nightly. Here’s a link to Emory’s dance program.…