To south of France, for ‘Montpellier Danse’

Dance · Travel
Launching just now, in its 44th year, a summer dance festival known for edgy, forward-looking content in an ancient, historic city is Montpellier Danse. Montpellier, France’s eighth-largest city, gleams with Mediterranean sun bathing its beautiful, walkable historic center. This year, for the first time ever, artsmeme will attend the dance festival. At right, from choreographer ...

Critic’s notes: In Pasadena, Jammin’ with Jelly Roll Morton

Dance · Theater
Janaya Mahealani Jones, Naomi C. Walley, Cyd Charisse Glover-Hill Jelly’s Last Jam / photo by Jeff Lorch It doesn’t get more rollicking than the scene in the photo above, a trio of triple-threat red-hot mamas bumping and grinding in their bawdy-house skivvies in Dell Howlett’s well-crafted choreography for Jelly’s Last Jam, now on at the ...

Fantastic: new generation discovers Jack Cole, launches ‘homage’ nightclub act in his name 2

Architecture & Design · Dance
I could not be more delighted. In my upcoming biography of the dancer/choreographer Jack Cole, which is completed but awaits publication, I have written extensively about the three outlets in which Cole choreographed and performed: on the Broadway stage, on screens of Hollywood, and in nightclub stage shows. All three bear witness to his dance ...

Swirling in motion & color with Blue13 Dance Company

Architecture & Design · Dance
Over an unsually chilly weekend in Los Angeles, a large posse of creatives — Blue13 Dance Company — lived up to its colorful name, staging a site-specific work masterminded by choreographer Achinta McDaniel, a large snippet of which we enjoyed in dress rehearsal. In a small city comprised of eight Victorian homes of Heritage Square ...

Rauschenberg a pawn in Cold War politics, asserts new doc TAKING VENICE

Dance · Visual arts
A new documentary that addresses a seminal moment in which the art world came mano-a-mano with political intrigue is director Amei Wallach’s TAKING VENICE , from Zeitgeist Films, which opens tonight at the Laemmle Royal theatre in West Los Angeles, followed by a Q/A with the director. The doc examines the rumors that the 1964 Venice ...

Revisiting ‘Seven New Dances’ as a periscope to Paul Taylor’s future, at 92NY

Dance
by 
It has become a celebrated and notorious moment in modern dance history: Paul Taylor’s Seven New Dances, the evening of purposely un-dancey pieces that inspired the now-famous blank newspaper review by Louis Horst. On May 13, reconstructions of works from that evening will take the stage of Kaufmann Concert Hall at the 92nd Street Y, ...

Hilarious! Quentin Tarantino directs ‘Pulp Fiction’ dance number

Dance · Film
An on-set devil captured footage as Quentin Tarantino directed Uma Thurman and John Travolta in their iconic twist to a Chuck Berry song. It does beg the question: Is that how John Ford directed? Tarantino demonstrated on a British talk show host his inspiration for the choreography. artsmeme interviews a dancer/choreographer who did not do ...

Attend New York City Ballet — in a sensitive way 1

Dance
On a day when five highly sensitive creatures — a cluster of the British monarchy’s beautifully bred military horses — got “spooked” (an actual term for when horses react and skitter and scamper) and proceeded to throw their riders and gallop around London causing havoc, it’s time for human beings face the limits of our ...

Pas-de-deux in perpetuity: Travolta & Thurman in ‘Pulp Fiction,’ at TCM Fest 2024

Dance · Film
At the conclusion of the witty dance duet between Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman), on the dance floor of a kooky retro coffee-shop-style restaurant, the full auditorium of TCM Fest 2024‘s opening night gala at the TCL Chinese Theatre broke into spontaneous applause. The occasion was the screening of Pulp Fiction ...

Mesmerizing balletic ode to Virginia Woolf new signature work for American Ballet Theatre 2

Dance · Reviews
American Ballet Theatre, now in its eighth decade, reclaims its mantle as a font of top international repertoire with “Woolf Works,” a theatrical evocation of three novellas written by the most poetic of 20th century authors, Virginia Woolf. The ambitious full-evening ballet has contemporary-classical choreography by Briton Wayne McGregor to a moody and rambunctious original ...