sidebar_brian_brooks.jpg

Posts Tagged ‘ Aszure Barton ’

It’s All in the Family

by Dianne Vapnek Posted: Thursday, 12/8/2011

 

“A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.”
- Ogden Nash

Family.  Such a loaded word with so many complex meanings that vary for each of us.  It’s a term that is universally understood and emotionally charged.  For the purposes of this blog, I want to talk about my family of dancers and choreographers.

When I visit NYC, much of my time is divided between visiting my related family and what I’ve now come to consider my chosen dance family.  Each group brings pleasure, meaningfulness and richness into my life.  My interactions with them deepen my perspectives and expand my horizon.  We connect eagerly and instantly as if no time has passed between us.

“The children have been a wonderful gift to me, and I’m thankful to have once again seen our world through their eyes. They restore my faith in the family’s future.”
Jackie Kennedy

My chosen dance family is an unexpected bonus that I’ve received from the years I have spent presenting and supporting contemporary dance. I don’t really think of them as my children, although they are all years younger than I am, but they do provide insights and inspiration as my own children do!  Yearly or bi-annual visits with the choreographers I’ve come to know and love become deep exchanges of experiences, updates, enthusiasm for each other’s accomplishments and understanding of each other’s challenges.  These relationships have added an inspirational depth to my life that I recognize as a privilege and a joy. 

Maybe it’s the time of the year, but I want to express gratitude to my family of dancers and choreographers who give so much of their time, energy and selves to create art for our troubled planet and whose art provides evidence to me that humans are capable of greatness.

Tere O'Connor

Doug Varone

To:   Aszure Barton, Brian Brooks, Doug Elkins, Doug Varone, Larry Keigwin, Tamango, Tere O’Connor and to all the dancers who have passed through SUMMERDANCE and/or DANCEworks residencies.  

Doug Elkins

Tamango

Aszure Barton

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Larry Keigwin

Brian Brooks

 

THANK YOU for making my world a richer one!

 THANK YOU for sharing your talents and for your perseverance in the face of enormous fiscal and organizational challenges!

 THANK YOU for your support of and encouragement for my work!

 THANK YOU for being true to yourselves and your own unique artistic vision!

Wishing everyone a wonderful holiday season!

 






Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Dance Buzz | No Comments »

Welcome Brian Brooks

by Dianne Vapnek Posted: Monday, 9/12/2011

 

When you meet choreographer Brian Brooks for the first time, the first words that might come to mind to describe him are preppy, nice, engaging, clean cut, bright and clever.  But then you might notice the demonic twinkle in his eyes.  hmmmm.  When you learn his artistic history  your descriptive words  expand to include bold, daring, and risk-seeker.  He’s a man not afraid to wear pink.  That’s Brian on the right, performing at SUMMERDANCE.

In case you haven’t guessed or heard it, Brian Brooks has been selected to be our Danceworks 2012 Choreographer-in-Residence. Following on the heels of Aszure Barton, Larry Keigwin and Doug Elkins, Brian’s residency will give audiences a chance to see the enormous and exciting range of diversity that exists within contemporary dance.  Brian is very excited about bringing his company to Santa Barbara to make new work during the month of March 2012.

Brian is a NYC choreographer with an unusual take on movement. His initial artistic vision for a work almost always includes set and costume design.  (These elements are usually added by collaborators when the choreography is completed .) I always think of him as a visual artist. His thinking is expansive.  He envisions possibility rather than failure. He explores the limits of the physical body’s endurance with challenges and repetition.  He is a choreographic daredevil.  Just take a look at this youtube video he created:  RAPID STILL.

Brian’s career has been taking off in recent years.  He first visited Santa Barbara as a popular SUMMERDANCE artist, performing at Center Stage Theater as well as at the SUMMERDANCE cabaret.  This year he was awarded a prestigious NDP (National Dance Project) grant that will provide funding to help him tour the work he is creating during his DANCEworks residency.

The piece created and performed at the Lobero Theatre will be called Big City.  Brian and his dancers will build an architectural structure during the performance that extends beyond the stage as the work progresses. Stay tuned for more exciting details of Brian Brooks Moving Company residency.

 Performance dates at the Lobero Theatre are March 30, 31, 2012.

Stay Tuned!

 

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Dance Buzz | No Comments »

BUSK in Italy

by Marianne Clark Posted: Thursday, 7/7/2011

Just a quick DANCEworks update: Aszure Barton & Artists are in Spoleto, Italy this weekend, performing at the Festival dei Due Monde. This is just another step in Busk’s world domination tour. In other news, Larry Keigwin opened Jacob’s Pillow last month, and Doug Elkins just performed this past weekend at The Yard in Martha’s Vineyard. We are so proud of all our Choreographers-in-Residence!

We want to again thank our DANCEworks supporters. Our residency is having a national and international impact, and helping these wonderful choreographers to build their repertoires and careers. We look forward to sharing the coming year (featuring Brian Brooks) with you and with the community of Santa Barbara!

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Dance Buzz | No Comments »

Review of Aszure Barton’s BUSK

by Marianne Clark Posted: Monday, 1/18/2010

Here’s a review from January’s Dance Magazine of Aszure Barton’s BUSK, which began at Aszure’s 2009 DANCEworks residency.

Aszure & Artists
Mertz Theatre
Sarasota, FL
October 8–10, 2009
Reviewed by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Busk. What a great title for Aszure Barton’s spanking new ensemble dance, a world premiere at the inaugural season of the five-day Ringling International Arts Festival in Sarasota, FL, co-presented by the Baryshnikov Arts Center and the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. I can just imagine the gifted Canadian choreographer mulling over this commission, licking her chops, thinking about all the things buskers—street performers—do to lure audiences and earn a little cash.

Wikipedia spells it out: acrobatics, animal tricks, balloon twisting, card tricks, clowning, comedy, contortions and escapes, dance, fire eating, fortune-telling, juggling, magic, mime and a mime variation where the artist performs as a living statue, musical performance, puppeteering, snake charming, storytelling or reciting poetry or prose as a bard, street art (sketching and painting, etc.), street theater, sword swallowing, or even a flea circus. And, let me tell you, that’s just the brilliant opening solo danced by Kyle Robinson, who looks like a young Brad Pitt.

The notion of entertainment to charm a distractable, fickle public—and of entertainment as survival strategy, with performers at the edge of desperation—seems right for our times and especially right for Barton. (It also links in, in its funny way, with the Ringling circus tradition.) Championed early in her career by Baryshnikov, Barton has made works that combine popular accessibility and melancholic darkness in equal measures. And she regularly treats her “pitch”—the busker’s territory—as a gallery for monumental kinetic art.

It is no different in this mysterious new abstract piece where, as is Barton’s way, costumes merely offer hints of narrative possibilities. Huddling dancers in dark hoodies, in one section, could signal everything from homeless street kids to a death-spooky group of monks, but no matter. We’re not meant to hold onto any identification long enough to pin it down.

Dancers’ bodies move like bold splashes of paint, match the slippery suppleness of clay, shimmer and resonate like stringed instruments, sing in overtones, and emote in a multitude of tongues. Today, many dance artists collaborate widely and consider their productions to be multidisciplinary. Barton—with an assist from her dancers, among the most magnetic and psychologically expressive performers onstage today—delivers the multidisciplinary, and multivalent, body.

A dancer’s long frame undulating, while one hand—adjoined to and splaying out from a hip—wriggles like a sea anemone, is at once human, not quite human, and a collective of humans, or perhaps a collage of human experience. Barton, who famously builds on each of her dancer’s individual strengths, also seems quite confident and happy deploying a large group across sizable space. It’s amusing to realize that she can sneakily multiply a group even further by turning each one into many. This busker gives plenty of value for your money.

Busk is set primarily to gypsy music by Lev ‘Ljova’ Zhurbin. Nicole Pearce’s hazy lighting provides good atmosphere. Costumes are by Michelle Jank and projected visuals by Kevin Freeman and Shannon DMOTE Peel. Besides the stunning Mr. Robinson, Barton’s laudable corps includes Jonathan Alsberry, Collin Baja, Charlaine Katsuyoshi, Andrew Murdock, Reed Luplau, Emily Oldak, Banning Roberts, and Cynthia Salgado.

Tags: ,
Posted in Dance Buzz | No Comments »

by Dianne Vapnek Posted: Tuesday, 12/22/2009

HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM AB & A!!BUSK!  Happily begun at and co-commissioned by DANCEworks 2009.

Tags: ,
Posted in Dance Buzz | 2 Comments »

Autumn in New York

by Dianne Vapnek Posted: Monday, 11/9/2009

I am back in Santa Barbara, marveling at the clarity of the air and the quiet of the streets.  NYC is truly an alternate universe.  It is one of my great pleasures in life, while in New York, to reconnect with dancer and choreographer friends I have made over the years.  When possible we meet for dinner and if I’m very lucky and the timing is right, I have the pleasure of watching them rehearse.

My NYC experience was intense as it almost always is.  I watched in awe as Aszure Barton shuttled between rehearsals at ABT and BAC (Baryshnikov Art Center). Aszure shared a program of new work with choreographers Alexi Ratmansky and Benjamin Millepied, set on ABT dancers and performed at Lincoln Center. During the same period, she busily rehearsed her dancers in Busk, for its premiere at the Ringling International Arts Festival.

Doug Elkins, SUMMERDANCE 2004

I felt very lucky to spend a wonderful afternoon catching up with my dear friend Doug Elkins who is in the middle of touring Fraulein Maria, as he gears up for a two-week run at Dance Theatre Workshop in December. Anyone reading this who hasn’t yet had the pleasure of seeing Fraulein, BE THERE! I’d love to bring Doug back to Santa Barbara when the time is right…

Click here to read the story behind the creation of Fraulein.

October 7, 2009

Tamango (Urban Tap) and I met for lunch in the East Village at the buzzing Café Mogador.  Even in normally blasé city of NY, T turns heads wherever he goes.  I think it’s his striking combinations of headdresses, jewelry, patterns and color that people seem to universally respond to. We have a happy reunion, just grinning at each other for several minutes. In the few weeks that I am in NY, Tamango travels back and forth to dance twice in Paris as well as in Brazil.  Over multiple glasses of Moroccan tea, our conversation traverses great distances as well.  I learn that his two year- old daughter is a little artistic clone of her father, painting, and already listening intensely to music and stamping out rhythms! The magic of dna.  Tamango and I share a love for Japan and I daydream about going to Sado Island the next time he performs there with the Taiko drummers!

Tamango, SUMMERDANCE 2005

Watch Tamango perform  here.

October 12, 2009

Larry Keigwin at SUMMERDANCE 2005

Another lunch!…  today with Larry Keigwin to work out details of his upcoming April 2010 DANCEworks residency.  My first Saturday in town, I was just in time to see Larry’s company perform a new work, Sidewalk, in the theater of the Guggenheim Museum.   Danced to Steve Reich’s music, it was smart, funny and furiously paced; classic Keigwin.  Over lunch we determine that Larry will mount Bolero Santa Barbara during his residency.  I’m to recruit “citizen” performers from various groups who typify Santa Barbara to perform with his company onstage at the Lobero Theatre for the performance of this new work. Yogis!  Surfers! Skate Boarders!  Flamenco Dancers!  Are you listening?!  Come one, come all, April 23, 24, 2010.

Watch New Yorkers rehearse New York Bolero.

October 15, 2009

Way back in 1978 when my husband was on sabbatical at UCSF, I was young enough to take classes with choreographer Margaret Jenkins in her then new Mission Street studio in San Francisco.  I had never studied Cunningham technique and for several months during class, I was up when the rest of the class was down and vv. For the most part, saw myself sticking out like a sore thumb.  Marge was always a no- nonsense teacher who showed a combination once or twice and after that YOYO (You’re on Your Own!)  Most of the time I couldn’t even remember how the combination began, but somehow, I hung in there, admiring this charismatic, centered and brilliant woman and innately knowing that I would be a better dancer because of her.  I cried when that year came to an end and it was time to return to Georgia. Little did I know that 15 years later, Marge would do a guest residency at UCSB  and stay at my house. We’ve been fast friends ever since.

So it was with much anticipation that my husband and I traveled to Montclair State University in New Jersey to see her cross-cultural collaboration with the Guangdong Modern Dance Company of China. Marg goes where others fear to tread.  She dreams large.  She realizes her dreams and enriches all our lives because of it.  Don’t miss Other Suns, if it comes to a theater near you.

Check out Jenkins website and schedule here.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Dance Buzz | 5 Comments »