A production of From the Horse's Mouth celebrates Indian dance at New York's 14th Street Y. Next year, From the Horse’s Mouth will celebrate its twentieth anniversary. Since its debut at the Joyce Soho, over a thousand people connected with dance (twenty or more at a time) have performed in this peripatetic structured improvisation, conceived and directed by Tina Croll and Jamie Cunningham. … [Read more...]
Taking Folk Dancing into Today’s World
Tina Croll + Company performs in New York with Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass Band. I haven’t seen Tina Croll’s choreography for quite a while, although she and I were early members of Dance Theater Workshop, and I’ve performed in several versions of From the Horse’s Mouth, a structured improvisation involving text and dance that she devised with Jamie Cunningham (there’s one coming up in honor … [Read more...]
And Then They Talked Some More
Whoever said that dancers can’t talk well in public? These days, shutting up and just dancing is often not in the cards (there are some particulars that movement alone can’t reveal). This struck me when five of the seven performances that I managed to take in during four days of the annual event-crammed conference of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) involved … [Read more...]
Men Dancing: Then and Now
Eighty years ago, when Ted Shawn assembled the all-male company that toured the U.S. with him during the 1930s, he aimed to eradicate the notion that dancing was for sissies (the polite, if bullying term for boys whose masculinity was in doubt). Almost all of those who joined Shawn’s Men Dancers were graduates of Springfield College’s Physical Education Department, and he toughened them further in … [Read more...]