ArtsCriticATL.com

Dance continues to grab the spotlight in Atlanta’s arts community. Locally, the art form is past its awkward teenage phase and is finally coming of age. The latest sign comes from the Emory College Center for Creativity & Arts, which has named Malina Rodriguez, artistic director of Dance Truck, as the recipient of its 2011 Community [...]

The coming season will brim over with contemporary dance, a startling development in light of the slow economy. Across metro Atlanta venues, audiences will see an unusual, maybe unprecedented, range of unique and compelling choreography by artists from San Francisco to Tel Aviv. It seems a culmination of decades of work among Atlanta-based artists to [...]

Some months ago, choreographer Blake Beckham surveyed the Dovetail, a place at the back of the Goat Farm Arts Center where people rarely go. It’s one of three locations at the former cotton mill where she planned to set “PLOT,” her first outdoor site-specific work. Barren winter trees grew out of a run-down, century-old machine [...]

When choreographer Lauri Stallings brings site-specific dance to an urban public space, her charmed world enters our ordinary world, with unpredictable results — transcendent, fantastical, sometimes dangerous. Regardless of the outcomes, her goals are fairly consistent — to integrate art with the flow of daily life; to create situations where artists’ world and public sphere [...]

Picture a chorus. About 20 performers in black suits stand on bleachers at the bustling intersection of Peachtree and 15th streets. The air begins to churn with rhythmic, expressive motion. But these performers play no instruments and don’t utter a sound. The performers will be the dance artists of gloATL, choreographer Lauri Stallings’ contemporary performance [...]

The human psyche is layered with memories, experiences and personae. In “Layers,” Nicole Livieratos and her dance company Gardenhouse Dance show how these layers can decorate, define, protect or encumber us. We put them on and take them off. Like fabric, we fold and embroider them; like thread, we tie them into knots. Sometimes we [...]