Headlining at the Rainbow Room: Jack Cole and his Dancers

Dance
Cafe Life in New York Jack Cole and His Dancers Featured in the Rainbow Room’s New Show (by)  Malcolm Johnson The New York Sun, Saturday, May 18, 1942: The Rainbow Room’s new show, introduced this week, is a gay diversion highlighted by the colorful performance of Jack Cole and his Dancers. In fact there is ...

Eiko & Koma’s ‘Water,’ in a frigid lily pond

Dance · Visual arts
“Water is in our bodies, rivers, sea, our womb, and our tears.” So say Eiko & Koma, the Japanese-born performance duo, in an artists’ statement. Immersed for 45 beautiful, but bitter-cold, minutes in a Skirball Center lily pond, they encourage their audience to “remember and imagine the ancient water from which all living things came.” ...

A Gish gift for Trish

Dance · Film
Pleased to see Hollywood riches supporting New York creativity. That’s the way it oughta be. And especially nice that it’s an exchange between three creative women. [Item below re-posted from New York Times Culture Beat, September 7, 2011, 12:45 pm , by Daniel J. Wakin] Trisha Brown Wins Gish Prize A Gish for Trisha: the ...

Why art matters: Eiko & Koma and photographer Johan Elbers on lower Manhattan sand dune in 1980 2

Dance · Ideas & Opinion · Visual arts
Photo featured in Eiko & Koma: Time is not Even, Space is Not Empty Photo credit: (c)Johan Elbers (1980)   Like this? Read more: Eiko & Koma’s “Event Fission” at the landfill created for the World Trade Center, 1980

Eiko & Koma’s “Event Fission” before the twin towers of the World Trade Center (1980) 2

Dance
How did these two artists foresee that there would be hell to pay on this site? Who knows? They’re artists. They probably don’t know themselves. “Event Fissions” took place at sunset at Battery Park Landfill in Manhattan, which was created from sand dredged from New York Harbor and earth excavated during the construction of the ...

The Agnes & Cecil Show 1

Dance · Film
From Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille, by Scott Eyman, published by Simon & Schuster, 2010, page 307-308. Agnes deMille was struggling in London to make ends meet when Cecil hired her for six weeks at $250 a week to create the dances for Cleopatra. It ended badly, but then it ...

C.B. directs “Cleopatra” (1934)

Film

Eyman hits a bull’s eye; his “Empire of Dreams” wins prestigious theater book award

Film · Ideas & Opinion
Not just because he’s a friend of arts•meme, and a fellow toiler in the bowels of Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library, the resting place of the massive Cecil B. DeMille archives… [… a humongous trove of cinema-memorabilia prodigiously overseen by archivist James d’Arc...] The well regarded film historian, Scott Eyman (Lion of Hollywood: ...

The Juilliard School tells you everything you always wanted to know about Swan Lake but were afraid to ask

Dance · Ideas & Opinion · Music
The survival, let alone the mystique, of the ballet, Swan Lake, is a phenomenon few would have predicted at its premiere in Moscow in 1877 — which was a flop. Wikipedia notes [with added commentary]: The premiere of Swan Lake on March 4, 1877, was given as a benefit performance for the ballerina Pelageya Karpakova ...

America’s greatest immigrant: the Georgian, Giorgi Melitonovitch Balanchivadze 1

Dance
What a man, what an artist! It’s not a glower, it’s not a gloat; what on earth is that expression? [click on photo for better view.] It’s brains, bearing, and class. It’s the look of pure culture. But whatever was going through his mind, there stood Balanchine, majestic Georgian gentleman that he was, photo courtesy ...