Insite

Danceworks 2012 (Photo by Mike Peters).

What is dance? This question is consistently on my mind during each dance performance presented by Montclair State’s Department of Theatre and Dance, and Danceworks 2012 was no exception. Seven pieces in a variety of styles were performed, each created by equally unique types of choreographers and artists. Read more »

After opening last week, performances of PENANCE: The Ghost of Don Juan continue through Sunday, April 29. In my third and final video installment on the creation of this new production performed by the Montclair State Theatre Studies class of 2012, I spoke with members of the cast during a break from their physically demanding, hypersexual onstage adventures. And now a few words from Gillian Holmes, Victor J. Carinha, and Nicole Grassano! 

 

(Photo by Mark Garvin.)

The words “Gaga” and “fame” have become fused together in the pop culture lexicon ever since Lady Gaga’s debut album was released in 2008. Being a twenty-something pop music lover, my first thought when I heard about a “Gaga People” movement workshop at the Kasser Theater was whether I should wear my meat dress or my Kermit the Frog poncho. But Lady Gaga this was not. The “Gaga” in question refers to the movement language, developed by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, in which performers reintroduce themselves to the sensations of their bodies, allowing them to find their own natural and fluid movement. Read more »

Frank Van Laecke and Alain Platel. (Photo by Luk Monsaert.)

A cat has nine lives. 

They have more. 

And during their final life, they found each other in a safe ghetto. 

If you sneak your way in, you can see them clawing, growling, and hissing. 

And when the ghetto is demolished, all lives seem to have been used up. 

The trip to nothingness is crushing. 

Because even skin has a memory. 

Inspired by the penetrating film Yo Soy Así (by Sonia Herman Dolz), in which the closing of a transvestite cabaret in Barcelona affords us a glimpse into the private lives of a memorable group of older artists, actress Vanessa Van Durme collected a number of transsexual and transvestite friends for a project that can be called unique in every respect. Gardenia is not a work of fiction. Gardenia is a singular account, the most intimate of tales. Read more »

Gardenia. (Photo by Luk Monsaert.)

When I attended a performance of Gardenia in Montreal during the groundbreaking Festival TransAmériques, I was humbled by the gripping authenticity of the show’s performers and the intimately personal quality of their performances. Much of theater is predicated on fooling an audience into believing a staged reality. But what happens when the performers live a life of pretend in order to be accepted socially? 

In shows like La Cage aux Folles, men play women for effect, for entertainment, and only passing reference is made to the dilemmas of cross-dressing. Movies also have won large audiences when leading men have found it expedient to play women (think Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie and Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire). But what happens when a man chooses to be a woman in order to survive, to be real, and being entertaining is what is demanded of them by those who are watching—that is, by us? Read more »

Akram Khan, Leicester, 2010. (Photo by Laurent Ziegler.)

A Bangladeshi choreographer, a British urban planner, and a 13th century Sufi poet walk into a bar…the result is less punchline, more visual punch. The program notes for Akram Khan Company’s Vertical Road begin with a poem by Rumi; to ruminate (pun intended) on his ideas is a fitting beginning to this evening of dance and movement narrative. Read more »

At recent performances of Bill T. Jones’s Story/Time, we asked audiences to participate in the storytelling via a Twitter feed that was projected in the lobby. See what our audience members had to say, both about themselves and about the performance, after the jump!

Read more »

Story/Time. (Photo by Paul B. Goode.)

As the neon green strobe lights dotted the smoky dance floor, I stepped away for a moment and took a sip of water. On the opposite side of the dance floor, the DJ leered from beneath the brim of his baseball cap and monitored the perimeter of the room from behind his turntable, nodding to the beats of the music approvingly while facing the crowd of dancers. I was just busting a move at a warehouse party in Baltimore when—strangely—I was reminded of John Cage. 

Although Cage’s music doesn’t sound like Aphex Twin, John Cage and his compositions have influenced the course of electronic music, dance music, classical music—pretty much every kind of music—for the past 50 years. Read more »

As part of Montclair State’s Creative Campus project, members of the UK-based dance company Wayne McGregor | Random Dance visited Montclair State for a series of discussions and workshops centering around the company’s “choreographic thinking tools,” culminating in last spring’s Brainstorm symposium on creative thinking.  In October, Wayne McGregor continued the conversation with the campus community, in conjunction with the company’s performances of FAR. Below, Brandon Monokian shares reflections inspired by this informal Q&A session; for more, read reports on the initial workshops, by Brandon and Sara Wintz. 

“Be wrong, be strong” is a philosophy I adopted about two and a half years ago. I was about to enter the professional world of the arts with four and a half years of theater school behind me and a degree about to be placed in my hand, and my confidence in my work was at an all-time low. Throughout my years studying in school, I had unwittingly become so obsessed with a perfect final product that I had forgotten the importance of the process, and the result was a series of safe and lackluster theatrical endeavors I’d rather forget. So I started being wrong and being strong and, in turn, learning from my mistakes. 

I took this attitude with me into a workshop with two members of choreographer Wayne McGregor’s company, Random Dance. With a virtually nonexistent dance background, I was skeptical of what I would be able to achieve in the course of a two-day workshop, but I threw myself into the experience. The workshop was life changing, and, as a result of what I learned, I gained a plethora of new techniques and tools I could use to generate ideas, communicate with others, and understand my own sense of self as a theater director and actor. Months later, I was ecstatic to learn that not only would Peak Performances host the American premier of Wayne McGregor | Random Dance’s FAR, but they had arranged a discussion with McGregor himself. Read more »

Wayne McGregor. (Photo by Nick Mead.)

“In flesh and blood lay the self and its articulations. With its own elaborate sign language of gesture and feeling, the body was the inseparable dancing partner of the mind or soul; now in step, now a tangle of limbs and intentions, mixed emotions. Organism and consciousness, soma and psyche, heart and head, the outer and inner—all merged, and all needed to be minutely observed if the human enigma were ever to be appreciated.” 

—Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason 

In rehearsal for Wayne McGregor’s latest work, dancers from his company perform extraordinary motions. They throw themselves into whiplash spins, let waves ebb through their necks, build counterintuitive curves and angles into limb and spine. No other contemporary choreographer has developed such an instantly recognizable range of movement—familiar yet dazzlingly novel, giving bodies new things to do while speculating about the minds that inspire them. Read more »