021 Urban Songline at the Blaffer Art Museum A group of dancers commandeered Blaffer Art Museum on Nov. 18, led by Houston improvisation legend Leslie Scates and University of Houston’s School of Theatre & Dance faculty Karen Stokes, Teresa Chapman and Becky Valls. The event, called, 021 Urban Songline, was part of Buildering: Misbehaving the […]
This year’s Dance Gallery Festival felt like going through a break-up, complete with bitterness, anger, fear, and the sweet memories that you must contextualize among the darkness. I was left wondering who had the power and, more importantly, how do you get it? Brute force, coercion, rewards, fear… power takes effect in various forms. […]
It just feels good when theater seats are full with students wrestling and curious about what modern dance means. This was the case at The Barn for Karen Stokes Dance’s opening night student preview of their program Dance, Film, and Conversation. In the post-show conversation, they sat with their notebooks insistent they understand exactly what […]
Frame Dance Productions Serves Up a Delicious Event Just when I thought Houston dance was experiencing a bit of a lull, in walks a gaggle of Search Optimizer workers, Deuce Ticklebeetle, Shelly Kelly, Roxi Wright, Gretchen Charise Kittridge, Gwenevieve Hues, and Alyssa Roberts, to Good Dog Houston to mess with our heads. The event was […]
SonKiss’d Dance Theater billed its show Go as an “experience” because of the company’s commitment to sharing their Christian faith above their own performance. SonKiss’d Dance Theater presented Go, a hybrid of contemporary and hip hop dance, spoken word poetry, live painting, and original music, on March 28-29 and April 4-5. The message was empowering, […]
Houston Ballet celebrated its leader’s tenth year at the helm by performing three of his works in one evening, a perfect Stanton Welch Wonderland and a great way to examine this choreographer’s gifts to ballet. Each showed off a particular strength and thread in his work. With Beatae Memoriae (Of Blessed Memory) we see […]
Photos by James Wiseman, Reefpix.org The annual Dance Houston festival has been a successful platform for emerging dance companies and new choreographers for the past decade. Sonkiss’d Dance Theater made one of its first public appearances at last year’s festival, and this season’s larger company followed through on that promise of good things to come. The […]
Modern dance has a history of its choreographers being in conversation with visual artists. Two of the more famous examples would be Martha Graham with Isamu Noguchi and Merce Cunningham with Robert Rauschenberg. Following in that tradition is choreographer Teresa Chapman and visual artist Lucinda Cobley, both based in Houston. Their cross-disciplinary conversation gave us […]
The audience for NobleMotion’s Collide experiences a tender moment in the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts’ Zilkha Hall before the show even begins. The curtain is raised and the dancers and Austin-based rock band My Education are visible for all to see. The dancers mark the evening’s work while My Education runs through their set. As […]
In what other season would you see sparkling fringe, bright pink hoop skirts, and male feet and svelte legs in point shoes skimming across the floor? What about feather collars, shirtless men, and repetitious leaping and tumbling across the stage? Certainly not spring— I’d say summer, if I had to wager my artist’s salary. Summer […]
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