Category Archives: Shall We Dance Friday

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5/22/15 O&A Shall We Dance Friday: Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux – Patricia McBride and Mikhail Baryshnikov

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Shall We Dance

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Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux with Patricia McBride and Mikhail Baryshnikov was recorded in 1979. George Balanchine acquired the rights to the music in 1953 and he used it to devise a party piece for a principal couple, amending the choreography each time to suit each pair of dancers. You have to admire Patricia McBride’s diamond-edged footwork including entrechats skimmed millimetres from the floor, or wonder how Baryshnikov’s twelfth consecutive double cabriole can look as easy and elegant as the first.  Continue reading

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5/15/15 O&A Shall We Dance Friday: 5 Incredible Argentine Tango Performances

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Shall We Dance

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Lots can be said about performance tango but I am a lot more of a milonga kind-of-guy. Milongas are social dance parties at the dance halls that are less formal, less rigid, and much more nuanced by the small dance floors and relationships that form. Milongas are a place to find “under the radar” performance gems. Here are my top 5 picks of the best Argentine Tango performances at milongas in 2014 (new rankings based on viewers’ choice):

1. Chicho Frumboli & Juana Sepulveda Performing at Dance Manhattan (NYC)
                                                                                                                                                                                                               

2. Ismael Ludman & Maria Mondino at Timisoara Tango Story (Timisoara, Romania)

3. Michael Nadtochi & Eleanora Kalganova at Prischepov Milonga (Russia,Moscow)

4. Gustavo Naveira & Giselle Anne – The Great Milonga at Goldcoast Ballroom (Coconut Creek, FL)

5. Claudio Gonzalez & Melina Brufman – Milonga Apertura at Rosario Tango Festival (Rosario, Argentina)

Written by Vlad Shifrin for Danceus.org

 

 

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5/1/15 O&A Shall We Dance Friday- Encore Performance: Le jeune homme et la mort by Roland Petit (Zizi Jeanmaire & Rudolf Nureyev)- 1966

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Le Jeune Homme et La Mort was choreographed by Roland Petit  choreographed in 1946 to Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 582, with a one-act libretto by Jean Cocteau. It tells the story of a Young Man driven to suicide by his faithless lover. Sets were by George Wakhevitch and costumes variously reported as being by Karinska or Cocteau. Continue reading

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4/21/15 Shall We Dance Friday: Maya Angelou’s Harlem Hopscotch: Official Music Video

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The official music video for Dr. Maya Angelou’s Harlem Hopscotch. Dr. Angelou’s inspiring song is featured on the newly released album Caged Bird Songs, produced RoccStar and Shawn Rivera by of the R&B vocal pop group Az Yet. The song is about encouraging everyone, especially young people to persevere through life despite any obstacles!  Continue reading

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4/10/15 O&A Shall We Dance Friday: Lady of the Camellias – Marcia Haydee & Ivan Liska (1986)

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Lady of the Camellias is a ballet by John Neumeier with music by Frédéric Chopin, created for Marcia Haydée, then prima ballerina of the Stuttgart Ballet. It premiered at the Staatstheater Stuttgart in 1978. The theme of The Lady of the Camellias is a love story between Marguerite Gautier, a “demi-mondaine” (“courtisane” in the original French, i.e., a woman “kept” by various lovers, frequently more than one at a time) suffering from tuberculosis, and a young provincial bourgeois, Armand Duval.  Continue reading

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Shall We Dance Friday: Bad Blood by Ulysses Dove

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Bad Blood received its World Premiere, in 1984 on Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal. Featuring music by Laurie Anderson (Gravity’s Angel and Walking and Falling) and Peter Gabriel (Excellent Birds) the work in an erotic tour de force battle of the sexes. The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre premiered the work in 1986. It is one of seven Dove ballets in the Ailey Company repertoire.  Continue reading

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3/27/15 O&A Shall We Dance Friday: Serenade

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Serenade is a ballet by George Balanchine to Tschaikovsky’s 1880 Serenade for Strings in C, Op. 48. Students of the School of American Ballet gave the first performance on Sunday, 10 June 1934 on the Felix M. Warburg estate in White Plains, N.Y., where Mozartiana had been danced the previous day. This was the first ballet Balanchine choreographed in the United States.  Continue reading

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3/20/15 O&A Shall We Dance Friday: Bones The Machine

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Shall We Dance

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Steven Hill, aka Bones The Machine is a Flex dancer, actor and model. He performs jaw-dropping style of dance that originated from Jamaican brukup, and is rooted in the streets of east Brooklyn. The dance, which consists mainly of shapes you form with your arms, is called ‘Bone Breaking’ as it really looks like Steven has traded his skeleton for some sort of elastic gum. Bones has spent several years to develop his unique technique where he mixes contortion and improvisation with other styles from parallel dance movements such as tutting, popping, connecting and waving – and even a bit of ballet. Continue reading

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3/13/15 Shall We Dance Friday: Excerpts From The Ballerinas (1987) – Starring Carla Fracci

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Shall We Dance

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In The Ballerinas, a sumptuously produced two-part ballet drama, Fracci places her rare artistry in the service of dance history as she recreates roles first premiered by such luminous ballerinas as Marie Taglioni, Emma Livry, Carlotta Grisi, Fanny Elssler, Giuseppina Bozzacchi, Carlotta Brianza, Matilde Kschessinska, Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina and Olga Spessitzeva. Continue reading

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3/6/15 O&A Shall We Dance Friday: Promethean Fire- Paul Taylor Dance Company

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Promethean Fire (2002) is danced to the music of three of Leopold Stokowski’s famous Bach transcriptions (Opus 116). The ensemble work is one of Paul Taylor’s six ballets set to the music of the baroque master. This excerpt is the first movement choreographed to the celebrated Toccata and Fugue in D minor.   Continue reading