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With Catlike Tread: Tap Dancer Jason Samuels Smith at the Joyce Theater

City Arts — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 19:51:18 +0000

Jason Samuels Smith electrifies the stage with the grace and fierceness of a cat. The heir of Gregory Hines, he pushes the boundaries of tap, with a sure grasp of its history and potential.

Only 31, Smith has already won numerous awards, including the 2009 Dance Magazine Award, an Emmy for a television tribute to Gregory Hines, and a certificate of appreciation from the city of Los Angeles. He has also starred on Broadway and television, performed at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival and Sadler’s Wells in London, and served as associate choreographer for TV‘s “Dancing with the Stars.” His company ACGI (Anybody Can Get It) tours the world.

“I believe tap dance is connected to all things through mathematics and rhythm,” he says, “and the sheer spiritual energy it creates.  It is a true universal language, which we are still developing and mastering. Its full potential is still unreached.”

When Smith comes to the Joyce Theater July 3-7, for his first full week season there, audiences will get a chance to see the premiere of his three-part work with the titles “Imagine,” “Charlie’s Angels,” and “Chasing the Bird” to a musical arrangement by Theo Hill and the tunes of Charlie Parker and Horace Silver. It will be performed by his five-piece band, and the great dancers Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, Chloe Arnold and Michelle Dorrance.

In “Imagine,” Smith takes the role of an artist finding inspiration to dance and embracing art. Sumbry-Edwards, Arnold and Dorrance shine in “Charlie’s Angels,” tapping to recordings of Charlie Parker’s “Half Nelson,” “Yardbird Suite” and “Bird Gets the Worm.” Finally, they all take on specific characters in “Chasing the Bird,” as Smith becomes an artist who has given into materialistic temptations.

He likes contributions from his dancers when he’s choreographing. “Jason creates beautiful music,” says Arnold, “and then allows us to put our own style of movement to the work.” As interested in producing as performing, he hopes to give his dancers even more autonomy in the future. “I’d like to see this new work in a theater for an extended run,” he says. “I plan to develop a few productions that could run simultaneously. I would perform in them on and off.” A man with a mission, he adds, “I want to see and hear tap on television and radio, in films and on the Internet.”

All Along the Lines

City Arts — Thu, 03 May 2012 16:26:16 +0000

Alonzo King’s Ballet at the Joyce

BY VALERIE GLADSTONE

When Alonzo King established LINES Ballet in 1982 in San Francisco, few believed he could maintain a new company in the city where the San Francisco Ballet had long captured the area’s ballet audience. Moreover, King did not conform to the typical ballet artistic director—he grew up in Santa Barbara in a distinguished family of movers and shakers in the African American community, trained at both the school of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and American Ballet Theater and performed with Dance Theater of Harlem. Even more unlikely, he wanted to start his venture on the West rather than the East Coast.

Quickly, he proved all the doubters wrong.

Today, King is one of the top choreographers in classical contemporary dance, with a wide-ranging repertory that includes collaborations with numerous international composers, musicians and visual artists, including China’s Shaolin monks, actor Danny Glover and jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders. Plus, the company has an enviable tour schedule and a vibrant school.

It has been featured at the Venice Biennale, the Edinburgh Festival, Montpellier Danse and the Holland Dance Festival, and King has been commissioned by the Swedish Royal Ballet, Frankfurt Ballet, Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, The Joffrey Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Hong Kong Ballet and North Carolina Dance Theatre, among others.

Asked the secret of his success, King says, “I try to choreograph beautiful works that resonate with universal truths.”

In LINES Ballet’s upcoming season at The Joyce Theater May 8-13, King’s choreographic gifts and widely heralded dancers will be on display in a program including Scheherazade, commissioned by the Monaco Dance Forum to inaugurate the centenary of the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo and set to a new score by tabla master Zakir Hussain after Rimsky-Korsakov, and Resin, an exploration of Sephardic music with songs and field recordings from Yemen, Turkey, Morocco and Spain.

A true scholar of the world’s cultures and music, King mines relationships between diverse groups of people, bringing them subtly to light in works like those that will be presented at The Joyce Theater. The character of Scheherazade particularly fascinated him. He explains that she had to convince the ruler not to kill her and save her sisters by healing him with her voice.

“It wasn’t simply her stories,” he says, “but her voice. It transported him. Your voice is the key to who you are. I had to show this through movement, how her lovingness transformed him. In a sense, she represents the divine mother.”

While he likes the Rimsky-Korsakov score, he also thrives on working with living composers, and so asked Hussain for a new score. “It’s a partnership when I collaborate with a composer, just as choreographing is a partnership with my dancers. Artists are givers. They inspire me,” King explains.

Dancer David Harvey joined LINES five years ago. “Alonzo sees endless possibilities in dance and his dancers,” he says. “It makes it challenging but also rewarding—you never reach the point where you are finished.

“He’s never abandoned ballet; he’s committed to fulfilling its potential. He’s a purist in the best sense—no flash, no glitter, just honest and courageous dance.”

Stephen Petronio Company at the Joyce

admin — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 23:22:09 +0000

By Janet Allon

The veteran, and yet still youthful, choreographer Stephen Petronio opened his short run at the Joyce last night. It was both a star-studded affair, and a performance filled with athleticism and extraordinary, sometimes challenging beauty. Petronio, who describes himself as the bastard child of modern dance pioneers Steve Paxton and Trisha Brown, opened the show himself with a reprise of Paxton’s “Intravenous Lecture,” a spoken word dance on the theme of censorship, and art. The piece was groundbreaking when Paxton made it in 1970, and it retains its power to, if not shock, at least wow, opening as it does with a doctor inserting an IV drip in Petronio’s arm. He remains attached to the pole and bag as he recounts adventures in London, where he was arrested for wearing a so-called lewd Vivienne Westwood t-shirt, and espouses his general philosophy of love and celebration of the body.

(Photo courtesy of the Stephen Petronio Company. Photo by Julie Lemberger.)

The rest of the program consists of two largish group dances which Petronio choreographed ten years apart, City of Twist, a kind of homage to New York after 9-11, and the brand new number The Architecture of Loss. In both cases the striking movement and counterintuitive choreography is well-served not only by the amazing dancers, but by costumes that in every way serve their purpose of showing the beauty bodies, backwards mens shirts, worn with no pants, by Tara Subkoff/Imitation of Christ, and extraordinary loosely yarned shirts and dresses by Gudrun & Gudrun. Hypnotic music by Laurie Anderson and Valgeir Sigurosson, and a brief solo by prima ballerina Wendy Whelan, of the New York City Ballet, round out the star-studdedness. On view until March 11, but Whelan is only there until the 9th.

The Stephen Petronio Company program runs through Sunday, Mar. 11, at the Joyce Theater, 175 8th Ave. (betw. 18th & 19th Sts.), to purchase tickets or for more details visit. joyce.org).