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The Nixon Theatre was the top game in town — the place where circa 1971 I saw naked people writhe on stage in “Hair.” Not surprisingly, the hard working Jack Cole once pounded its floorboards, playing a Hungarian gypsy in “Venus in Silk” in 1935.

I’m guessing that this operetta, a precursor to American musical theater, was a schmaltzy little nostalgia for the good ‘ole Austro-Hungarian empire …

There’s Jack, as Raki the gypsy, listed at the bottom of the roster. Well cast. To put it mildly, Cole, who picked up the habit from his time with Ruth St. Denis, was an early dance “internationalist.”

The name of Cole’s nightclub partner, Alice Dudley, whom he met in the Humphrey-Weidman troupe, appears right above his. Dancers? Are you getting this? Jack Cole and Alice Dudley danced in 1) modern dance, 2) night club and on 3) Broadway stage. There were no categories… they did it all!

The Internet auctioneer calls “Venus” a “rare flop” reflecting that the show opened in Pittsburgh on  October 1, 1935 as an out-of-town tryout and closed the following week in Washington, D.C., failing to arrive on Broadway.

The operetta had only had its debut in Zurich in 1932 — tough times in Europe for itsJewish composer Robert Stoltz. A timeline of Stoltz’s amazing career here. I remember my Hungarian boyfriend complaining about the  heavy diet of saccharine operettas he grew up on in Budapest. This must be the stuff he dreaded.

I do love how “Venus in Silk” is called, on the program, a “gay musical.” I bet it was.

Like this? Read more:

• Nijinsky danced in Pittsburgh
• Say a dance prayer for Gene Kelly in Pittsburgh
• Choreographer Kyle Abraham remembers Pittsburgh radio station (Los Angeles Times)

**LATE BREAKING NEWS ** UPDATE ** LATE BREAKING NEWS ** UPDATE**

The Paul Taylor Dance Company announced today that its upcoming 2011-12 three-week New York season will be held at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center from March 13  – April 1, 2012. “I am looking forward to seeing my amazing dancers perform on stage at Lincoln Center, a spectacular theater,” said Paul Taylor. Kudos to Taylor and to Lincoln Center for this marvelous recognition of an artist’s life achievement!

It takes a village to foster a new dance work. That’s something Charles Reinhart, who retires as director of the American Dance Festival after this season, understands better than most.

But it takes the village elder to birth the baby, and that’s where Paul Taylor comes in. Revered in the dance world, he’s America’s last surviving third-generation modern-dance choreographer. Taylor celebrates his 81st birthday on July 29. My guess is he’ll spend it working.

Taylor’s newest piece, The Uncommitted, an ADF commission and his 18th work to premiere at the summer festival, makes headline news not just because Taylor still churns and burns as an artist. That counts too. It’s because he still has it going on.

At San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Performing Arts Center in April, I loved Brief Encounters from 2009. Works from 2010, Also Playing and Three Dubious Memories, were less strong, but it matters not; they’re still significant and emblematic of the native Pittsburgher’s naughty wit and zesty physicality. I’d rather watch anything Paul Taylor touched than do much else.

The Uncommitted, with its classic Taylor title that portends social commentary, gets its look and feel from the choreographer’s stalwart production design team: Santo Loquasto, set and costumes, and Jennifer Tipton, lighting design. Music is by Arvo Pärt.

The work honors Reinhart, who managed the Taylor company for six years before becoming the devoted director of the summer dance festival in 1968. What a legacy of service to dance! ADF’s roots date to the late 1930s at Vermont’s Bennington College, before moving to Connecticut College, and finally, to its current home at Duke University since 1977. All told, the venerable ADF is in its 78th season.

It was my pleasure, in 2009, to spend three weeks on the Duke campus as a fellow in the NEA’s Arts Journalism Institute for dance criticism. Reinhart hosted our group of writers at his lovely home the opening evening of our three-week stay. A wonderful memory.

The Uncommitted | Paul Taylor Dance Company | American Dance Festival |Thursday, July 21-Saturday, July 23, 8 pm

Like this? Read more:

• Gia Kourlis’s lovely review of this dance in the NYT.
• In San Francisco, to see PTDC.
• What makes a modern dancer? See Annamaria Mazzini.

Greetings from Wuhan, one of China’s “four furnaces.”

It’s a hot one today, blazingly sticky and humid; for every particle of air, an equivalent particle of dirt.

The dancers already had class and rehearsal and are hanging out, resting, before tonight’s show.

Wuhan is a big old-industry town in the heartland of China, a bastion of iron and steel industry, sometimes called the Pittsburgh of China. I have even called it that. But that was before I visited it. Proud of Pittsburgh’s charms, I won’t be saying that anymore.

We are staying in a local hotel and it’s a challenge. It’s the challenge I signed on for — because my China expatriate days in the ’80s and ’90s were spent in the relative comfort of the five-star foreigner experience. I never slept in local hotel rooms; I never ate three locally-cooked Chinese meals a day; I never hung around in the backstage of a Chinese theater. Every theater we visit we have to direct the re-taping of the Marley floor, mopping and washing it just so the dancers don’t get infected, their lungs full of dust and bacteria when they dance.

We have had problems getting a piano at every performance venue, to the great distress of our jazz band’s pianist. It’s not that China lacks pianos. The opposite. China has one of the frothiest markets for pianos in the world, with every precious single-child a burgeoning musical genius. It’s because getting anything done here requires a boatload of bureaucracy manipulation that our Chinese hosts simply failed to manage before our arrival — anywhere. We have had to beg borrow and steal almost everything needed to put on our show.

At SIAS University, our first residency, the band wandered the campus asking about instruments. They bumped into a foreign instructor who got them hooked up with stand-up bass, drums, and saxophone — but the keyboard has been a problem.

♦   ♦   ♦   ♦

After the pitilessly long day most Chinese put in, there’s not a comfy bed waiting at day’s end. The opposite. (This is a running theme… ) Chinese like hard beds, also known as a hard board. One of our guys plonked down on his bed when he got into the room and hurt his arse so much he could barely walk. Another told me that he woke up in the morning wondering, “Did I just sleep on the floor?” But mostly we are so wiped out that we zonk out.

The dancers also zonk out on the bus. They got trained on bus zzz’ing by driving in snowstorms during last winter’s Russian tour  — for sometimes up to twenty hours.

Whatever the hardships, we are having a wonderful time. The dancers are incredible troupers. No matter what China brings their way, they shake their head and insist, “Russia was way worse.”

From Wuhan, not the Pittsburgh of China,

your faithful correspondent,

(for) arts·meme

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsPqRKDxDDM

Happy Birthday Martha Graham
born in Pittsburgh on May 11, 1894, 117 years ago

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXgascpElKA

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G861C3J9ms

I wouldn’t miss it — if only because the cast includes Kyle Abraham, my homeboy from Pittsburgh, one of the best dancers in New York, and himself a gifted choreographer. If other cast members are Abraham’s equal, this show should offer some wicked good dancing.

Prophets of Funk | David Dorfman Dance | Carpenter Performing Arts Center | Long Beach, California | April 23, 2011

Like this? Read more:

• A crazy night in Long Beach as David Dorfman and Sly Stone converse & converge.
• Kyle Abraham, Bessie awardee
• Kyle Abraham & Dancers @ Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival

The veteran Broadway (“A Chorus Line”) and Hollywood film (“The Way We Were,” “Sophie’s Choice,” “The Sting”) composer went on, “I like the idea of being around talent in L.A. and Hollywood. We can take from the community,” he said.

The Pops, which performs summer concerts on the Rose Bowl lawn in the Arroyo Seco, surprised and delighted music lovers last August with Hamlisch’s appointment. It was a mighty coup hiding in plain sight.

At a recent Sunday afternoon fundraiser at the historic home of Craig and Carolyn Watson, the tall music maven charmed a group of Pasadena Symphony & Pops patrons. Deftly working the room, he then tinkled the ivories, even crooning, in a private concert.

The event took place hours before the Academy Awards broadcast, a fact not lost on Hamlisch. Taking his seat at a baby grand (especially installed for the occasion), he kibitzed, “When you lose an Oscar,” he explained, “you try to understand what company you are in.”

“That’s why I’m playing a medley of Oscar losers,” he said, launching into Irving Berlin’s “Cheek-to-Cheek” from “Top Hat” (1935). Next came Cole Porter’s, “I’ve Got you Under my Skin” from “Born to Dance” (1936) and then Hamlisch’s own, “Nobody Does it Better,” sung by Carly Simon in the James Bond flick, “The Spy Who Loved Me” (1977).

Hamlisch then turned to the winners. First, Jerome Kern’s romantic ballad, “The Way You Look Tonight,” then Hollywood’s national anthem, “Over the Rainbow,” followed by “Zippety Do Dah,” and “Three Coins in a Fountain.” He plummeted heartstrings with renderings of “Gigi” and “Moon River.” Finally, Hamlisch’s own “The Way We Were.”

Honoring Scott Joplin, whose ragtime romps reemerged into American popular culture when Hamlisch adapted them for “The Sting,” he noted that he only played this music because the movie carries special meaning for him: “I was body double for both Newman and Redford,” he quipped.

Taking a serious tone, Hamlisch said, “I’ve been doing Pops concert for twenty years (lately in Pittsburgh). It’s a great gift for a family.” He then made a plaintive plea for music education in schools.

Hamlisch expressed consternation in a private conversation: “We have kids growing up in a world where they don’t know Gershwin. I think it’s important for that to happen. We should do it so kids of today know the heritage American gave to the music world.”

Paul Jan Zdunek, the organization’s CEO said, “We’ve been going through a transition. Instead of circling the wagons, we made bold moves. Our symphony is resident orchestra at the Ambassador Auditorium. Our musicians are among the most sought-after studio orchestra members in film and television.

“And in Marvin Hamlisch, our new principal Pops conductor,” he said in a proud tone of voice, well warranted, “we have an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy and Pulitzer Prize winner.”

He forgot two  — Hamlisch also has a Golden Globe and a Tony~!

_{photos: courtesy bob millard}

Never mind that I’m a good twenty years older than Kyle — a full generation. He and I share a few Pittsbuggian, er … Pittsburghian pleasures. One is dance. I started to dance in my home town, so apparently did he.

The second is local radio. Kyle’s award-winning work was inspired by longtime r&b radio station WAMO going off the air. I grew up listening to seventies soul music on WAMO.

Kyle interweaves this loss for the community with his own personal loss — watching his aging father, a victim of Alzheimer’s disease, lose his verbal capacity.

I love the specificity of Kyle’s dance content, and appreciate his direct articulation of what the work is all about. This is ridiculously rare in the dance world.

Have a look at the luscious, silken movement language of Pittsburgher Kyle Abraham. Characteristic of our home town, this guy is for real. Another thing you’ll see in this video is really good dancers.

Like this? Read more:

• Kyle Abraham makes it or breaks it.

_{photo credit: Ian Douglas}

“I’d call the station many times to vote in support [of cutting-edge music the audience didn't like.]”

During my three-day visit to the historic summer dance venue, I enjoyed Abraham’s “The Radio Show,” which examines the role radio plays in the urban community. Abraham’s score includes Alva Noto, Beyonce, Bach, and myriad r&b song samples.

The 32-year-old dance maker recreates a ‘thumbs-up-or-down’ call-in feature that was popular on Pittsburgh’s black radio station, WAMO, which went belly-up and off the air a year ago. The dance commemorates the loss of a central community meeting point on the airwaves.

[Like Abraham,  I grew up in Pittsburgh listening to the station's soul-and-funk music format.]

The WAMO deejay would play a newly released song, and then egg on his audience: “Do you want to make that song … or break that song?”

“One time, I did call in to ‘break’ a song. The deejay coached me before I went on the air. He told me to say, “I wanna break that jam thing!” Abraham remembers, gently laughing, clearly enjoying the absurd jargon.

In the dance piece, Abraham juxtaposes the sound of radio chatter with an evocation of his father’s growing social isolation as he suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. He indicates this by interrupting the flowing movement with a halt; in this way, Abraham explains, “I am thinking about the synapses in the brain.”

“I love music. I organize sound,” says the choreographer who grew up playing cello, French horn, violin, and piano. “I love mixing tapes for friends and I wonder if I could have been successful as a musician. I choreograph to show how much I love music.”

Come on, home town!

What’s this I hear about twenty years of fruitless effort to erect a statue of dancer Gene Kelly  — in a city where bridges, steel mills, skyscrapers, and sports stadia get built with ease?

In a recent Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, retired entertainment columnist Barbara Cloud gripes that she’s grown despondent waiting for a little recognition for a great home town artist.

Says Ms. Cloud: “I don’t ask for much. Just a non-sports statue. A figure from the performing arts, one whose name is synonymous with Pittsburgh.”

You see, Western Pennsylvania, the bastion of football, baseball, and all sorts of other manly sweaty stuff, also birthed a few good dancers, among them, Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, and … ahem … me!  But of all of Pittsburgh’s dancing sons and daughters, probably the most famous is Gene Kelly.

Unlike Graham, who skedaddled to Santa Barbara, California, at age 15 and Taylor who deprecated the Steel City — then the nation’s soot-spewing industrial engine — Kelly was proudly all-Pittsburgh, fully growing up, learning to dance, and eventually teaching in his family’s East Liberty dance studio.

Pittsburgh and dance. Dance and Pittsburgh. Kind of goes together, doesn’t it? Don’t forget that Nijinsky danced in Pittsburgh.