This rich collection of essays and interviews explores modern dance technique training from the past fifty years. Focusing on the culture of dance, editors Melanie Bales and Rebecca Nettl-Fiol examine choreographic process and style, dancer agency and participation in the creative process, and changes in the role and purpose of training. Bringing recent writings on dance into dialogue with dance practice, The Body Eclectic: Evolving Practices in Dance Training asks readers to consider the relationship between training practices and choreographic style and content. The contributors explore how technique training both guides and reflects the art of dance.

Contributors include Melanie Bales, Glenna Batson, Wendell Beavers, Veronica Dittman, Natalie Gilbert, Joshua Monten, Martha Myers, and Rebecca Nettl-Fiol. Dance professionals interviewed include David Dorfman, Ralph Lemon, Bebe Miller, Tere O'Connor, and Shelley Washington.

(Read more...)

Working from the premise that dance history can be studied as it has been created in and through the bodies of dancers, Karen Eliot closely examines the lives and careers of five popular female dancers: Giovanna Baccelli, Adèle Dumilâtre, Tamara Karsavina, Moira Shearer, and Catherine Kerr. Notable dancers in European and Russian ballet and American modern dance genres, these women represent a historical cross section of performance, training, and technique.

By elegantly guiding the reader through the Russian Revolution, stage fright and illness, liaisons with aristocracy, movie stardom, and dancing rivalries, Dancing Lives provides valuable insight into the culture in which each woman performed. Readers are introduced to each dancer’s social and economic status, her education and training, and changing debates about dance and choreography. The resulting stories are packed with intimate personal details, keen descriptions of dance pedagogy and performance, and behind-the-curtain glimpses of popular dance trends.

(Read more...)

During Fall Quarter 2007, Valarie Williams Mockabee, Associate Professor and Certified Notator, staged Anna Sokolow’s choreographic work, Steps of Silence, from the 1975 Labanotation score by Ray Cook.  In January 2008, Lorry May, Director of the Anna Sokolow Foundation, and her assistant, Sue Ellen Haag, came for a week-long residency in the Department of Dance to teach technique and to coach the work. The students will tour the work to New York City to perform on the Sharing the Legacy Project:  Works from 1960-1980.  It will be featured at the OSUDance Downtown concert May 1-3, 2008 at the Capitol Theatre.

Steps of Silence is a work that is timeless. It was created in 1968 when “the entire post-war order was challenged by a series of insurrections from Berkeley to London, from New York to Prague.” It was a year of revolution, termed “the year of the barricades,” a moral revolt—a revolt of passion in the interests of humanity, from the Establishment, from ‘It’; a year of violence, both in the My Lai Massacre of the Vietnam War and on the home front with the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. John Lennon sang Revolution and Jefferson Airplane sang, "Now it's time for you and me to have a revolution." Steps of Silence addresses the issues of war, political unrest, unjust acts, and the individual’s plight. Linda Smith stated that “The strong emotional content of Steps of Silence was able to communicate the concerns of a troubled generation and political oppression…”  Inspired by writings of Franz Kafka and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn and set to music by Anatol Vieru, Steps of Silence examines individuals who must step quietly for “they know not who is watching—or listening—or reporting them to the authorities.  The only end is death.  They are as nothing—like paper being blown in the wind.”

Renowned choreographer William Forsythe has teamed with OSU’s Department of Dance and the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) to research and develop a new interactive online learning environment for one of his exceptional choreographic works, One Flat Thing, reproduced (OFTR).

The project analyzes Forsythe’s choreography systems as templates for creative problem solving that can be applied to other practices and fields. For instance, utilizing the multiple visual literatures provided on the site, an architect, mathematician or engineer might encounter applications that bring their own practices into new perspective. At the heart of this creative enterprise with interactive digital media is Forsythe's desire to have dance seen as a field of activity that has broad impact and to reinforce the fundamental idea that creative leaps in all fields often come about from the transference of concepts from one field to another. The web project's intent is not to have users make a virtual "Forsythe-like" dance, but, to be a catalyst for creative analysis in dance and in other areas of practice.

Co-Creative Directors Norah Zuniga Shaw (Director of Dance and Technology) and Maria Palazzi (Director of ACCAD) have been working closely with Forsythe and his company since 2005 to research OFTR and create rigorously analytical yet evocative scorings of its choreographic structures. More than 15 graduate students in design, computer science, dance, and visual art have taken part in the research and production process. The project is currently in the midst of the 15-month production timeline with a projected launch at the Wexner Center in January of 2009.

To paraphrase Einstein, “the most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious.” Necessary Beauty conjures the rhythm of action and memory – and that fleeting clarity a second look can provide. Comprised of intimate, multimedia segments for one to six dancers, Necessary Beauty continues a line of investigation into the convergence of dance, theater and digital technology that resulted in the Bessie award-winning work Landing/Place, and will feature the same creative team: choreographer/director Bebe Miller, video artist Maya Ciarrocchi, animator Vita Berezina-Blackburn, dramaturg Talvin Wilks, lighting designer Michael Mazzola and composer Albert Mathias. Joining the team with provocative new text is writer Ain Gordon. Performers include Kathleen Fisher, Angie Hauser, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Kristina Isabelle and Cynthia Oliver, along with Miller.

Choreographer Bebe Miller is a master of ‘story-ness,’ an exploration of intention and focus that feel like history and future at play. Our key words for the collaborative process – unseen influence and fleeting clarity - have found a metaphor in Dark Matter's invisible effect on the galaxies it encounters, as well as the passing epiphanies of overheard conversations and simple domestic intimacies. So: story-ness and physics, intention and focus, gravity and light reveal themselves in Dark Matter that dances.

(Read more...)