‘Radical Bodies’ in California exhibit and on the streets of New York
Politics was not the intended focus of the day-long conference that opened “Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955-1972,” an exhibit at UC Santa Barbara’s AD&A Museum. Art was. The hugely instructive exhibit unearths and traces the influence on American modern dance of three groundbreaking, bi-coastal dancer/choreographers. ...
Choreographer Leonid Yakobson’s Soviet struggle detailed at USC Conney Conference
Our good friend, the Stanford University-based dance historian Janice Ross, has written an important new biography about a seminal choreographer in the Soviet Union whose name does not have much recognition in the U.S. Few outside Russia know of Leonid Yakobson, a contemporary to George Balanchine and the leading modernist — and only Jewish — ...
Anna Halprin, Bill T. Jones, Hofesh Shechter
The big event of a busy fall season has been the historic reconstruction of Anna Halprin‘s “Parades & Changes,” an influential landmark of postmodern dance dating from 1965-67 featuring a soundscore by electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick. The piece builds on improvisation on a set of movement “scores” — a Halprin key word that she ...