Thank you!

Thank you to everyone who came out for the DanceATL and Atlanta Ballet event last night! I hope you found it insightful and stimulating. I didn't have a chance to thank everyone in my introduction last night, but I wanted to thank them here: SIDEWAYS Contemporary Dance for their beautiful performance, our guest panelists for all their intriguing thoughts about collaboration (I'll be posting notes later), Su Schwenk for moderating the panel, Atlanta Ballet and the Park Tavern for hosting in such a beautiful space, and Keif and Aly for doing all the work they've done with me in the last few months to get this thing off the ground.

If you have more questions about anything that came up for you after you went home, please comment! I'm especially interested in what you think about the format of the evening, with the performance followed by the talk and then what probably could be called "networking". And for the next meeting, who would you like to hear from about what topic? And if you thought of projects that you'd like to suggest for DanceATL to take on to help it grow and help the community grow, please comment on that as well!

Hope to see you at the next event! Until then, you can check out the Google calendar posted at www.danceatl.org (until we get the full website up, which will hopefully be sometime this summer.) And please contact us if you dont' see your performances or workshops listed!

Thanks and yay dance!

DanceATL Meeting

And in the midst of trying to give feedback on all the website ideas, putting up the facebook fan page and oh, you know, my regular job and being a mom, I kinda never put up the info about this weekend's meeting!

Oops! You should come meet all us DanceATL folks in person at the Park Tavern on Sunday at 7pm. We've got a short dance performance by SIDEWAYS, a discussion on collaboration with some notable dancemakers in town and a DJ to finish up the night! So come dance with us!

 

Mall dancing reviewed (not by me!)

Here's Cynthia's review of the Bloom show at Lenox this weekend. I went on Saturday afternoon amidst the crowds and found some dance friends as we wandered around watching the other friends dance. It's such a funny thing to be face to face with someone you know but trying not to make them break character. (Especially with my daughter who kept pointing and saying "dancers!") I had fun watching the crowd, and as expected I heard a "what the hell?" and a very dubious "oooookaay." It also reminds me how bad the traffic is and how crowded it gets--not to ever try to go to Lenox in the afternoon on a weekend again (the last couple times I went to walk around somewhere warm with my daughter, it was pretty much when they open....much better! If you have to go at all, I recommend 10 am. Unless there's dancing, of course!)

Call for Entries!

Beacon Dance, in association with
The Decatur Arts Festival,

is seeking entries for

Breaking New Ground: New Dance at The Decatur Arts Festival

Festival performance dates are Saturday & Sunday

May 29 & 30, 2010, at 8:00 PM each evening.

All participants will receive a small honorarium.

Entry Information -- Deadline Friday, February 26, 2010

Breaking New Ground Theme

For the first time, Breaking New Ground is pursuing a unifying theme for the
work that will be presented. The theme this year will be "A Bountiful
Feast." Entrants are encouraged to frame their entries from this thematic
perspective, and to address this theme in a broadly interpreted manner.
Successful entries will demonstrate a commitment to innovation.

Entries may be no longer than 10 minutes in length.

To enter a dance in the Festival, please fill out the following information
and return to D. Patton White, patton@beacondance.org.

Name:

Title of Dance:

Length of Dance:

Description of Dance:

(Please use additional space as needed)

Your e-mail address:

The mission of Beacon Dance is to develop peoples' understanding of the art
of movement as a means of communication. Beacon Dance is recognized within
the greater Atlanta community as a progressive leader of the contemporary
dance and performance scene. Continually pioneering the fields of
cross-disciplinary performance and site-specific performance, Beacon has
acquired a reputation of invention and innovation.

Article 19

It's icy out, so I'm watching some dance videos on my computer! Lots of fun stuff to watch from European dancemakers on British site Article 19. And a mostly negative opinion about social networking tools as ticket sellers. It's kind of fun to read something that doesn't gush about how fantabulous social media is, since it's such a huge trend in all marketing stuff these days. But they don't mention anything about Facebook events, which, unlike the status updates that the author says get buried, alert you outside of the status column and don't go away until you tell them to. I agree though, how anyone makes anything out of twitter, I still can't tell (sorry, we're on it to join the crowds, but it still makes my head hurt.) Anyone have anything to say in defense of twitter? I'd love to hear it!
And for now...I think I'll watch the video of Portuguese dancemaker Arthur Pita...

mall dancing

About gloATL's bloom at Lenox Mall this coming weekend, from Cynthia at artscriticatl.com
I have to admit having gone to the mall a couple of times with my daughter merely to have a warm place to get out of the house (toddlers and small spaces=fussiness). I saw the promotional video and posters for "bloom" and wondered how people register it along with all the other signage and displays in that kind of setting. It'll be even more interesting to see how people react/interact with the dancers! I remember performing one time in high school on a rickety stage in the middle of the mall (and all of us changing in the cluttered back room of a Bennetton...) This should be a lot more fun, to take it out in the halls, or "arteries" as the promo material describes it.

Cinderella interview

From ArtsCriticATL's Cynthia Bond Perry, here's an interview with one of Atlanta Ballet's Cinderellas, Tara Lee, about dancing the role. I was a corps member in Cinderella as a student long, long ago. I really like the Prokofiev music for this, though I think it's very difficult to choreograph parts of it (the "comic" parts of anything are always even harder to get right than the serious!) And apparently it's pretty difficult to play--we had an orchestra when we toured it to a smaller city that had a pretty rough time of some sections. (ouch!) I saw a production in Moscow by a smaller ballet company whose name I don't even remember (Bolshoi was off for the summer when I was there.) It may have also been a student company, though the leads were pretty amazing. Anyhow, enough reminiscing. I'm not sure if I can make it to this production (evenings are still pretty hard to do anything with the little one needing to be in bed by 8 and I think hubby can't keep her for an afternoon.) But I hope all you ATL dance folks enjoy it (performing and watching!)