Watch: Ephrat Asherie Dance, ‘Odeon’
Sometimes you see an excerpt from a dance and wistfully wish you had seen the show. That happened some time ago when I saw a trailer for Ephrat Asherie’s “Odeon”, which managed to suggest irrepressible cheers and good-humored inventions in a short sequence of clips from the hour-long dance. The work premiered at Jacob’s Pillow in 2018 and – Hurray! – Available now through April 28th on the Joyce Theater website, it features Asherie’s magnificent group of six dancers and four musicians under the direction of her brother, jazz pianist Ehud Asherie.
They play the infectiously melodic, dance music of the Brazilian composer Ernesto Nazareth from the early 20th century, and Asherie combines the various forms of music – sambas, waltzes, tangos, ragtime, African rhythms and classical varieties – with their own choreographic hothouse mix. Street and club dance, fashion and breaking, tap rhythms, capoeira and contemporary dance idioms are part of the mix. But Asherie has a keen eye for structure as she mixes lively group sequences with solos and smaller groupings, and often the silence underpins the energetic business.
“Odeon”, the title of the second Nazareth composition in the piece, is an ancient Greek name for a small theater in which poets, musicians and singers presented their works. It’s a perfect title for a dance that celebrates a community of artists with the kind of generosity that makes the viewer feel part of things too.
Watch: The Royal Ballet, “Symphonic Variations”
“I am honestly bored with too much characterization in ballet,” said choreographer Frederick Ashton after the end of World War II. In the following year, 1946, he created “Symphonic Variations”, an 18-minute abstract work for six dancers that plays on César Franck’s score of the same name, which the Royal Ballet will be showing online until May 2nd.
The piece is pure joy, from his first picture of three men and three women standing in a meditative pose, one leg crossed in front of the other – a motif Ashton comes back to throughout the piece. At the beginning of the piano the women begin to dance and a man joins them, similar to George Balanchine’s “Apollo” when the young god is playing sports with his muses. But there is no story in “Symphonic”, just a gentle, cool flow of movement in which the dancers configure and reconfigure in lyrical pas de deux, trios, quartets and solos in front of Sophie Fedorovitch’s yellow-green cyclorama, which is decorated with loop curves.
The dancers (Marianela Nuñez and Vadim Muntagirov are the central couple in this recording) never leave the stage; On some transitions, they just join hands and run to a new place. In “Symphonic” there is a lot that Ashton would use again and again later in his choreography: watch out for the smooth sideways curves, the low skimming lifts and the curved arms. Dancers have talked about how hard the work is to do, but its impact is, as writer Luke Jennings put it, “peace after war, spring after winter, space after compression”.
Watch: ‘Gallop Apace’ and ‘It Could Have Been Me … It Could Be Me’
These two short solos are well worth a visit. They’re very different, but both were shot by cameraman Trevor Tweeten, whose eye is precisely tuned to the drama of the moving body.
In Gallop Apace, a film produced by the Seattle Dance Collective and available until April 25, Sara Mearns offers an incarnation of Shakespeare’s Juliet in a short, almost static dance of compressed intensity by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber . In a press release, Mearns said she “longed but was never cast in the role of Julia”. Her appearance here is a tour de force of erotic passion, waiting, grief, shame and anger, and Tweeten’s cinematography makes the most of Ms. Mearns’ beauty and inwardness. Lingering close-ups alternate with her figure, which is framed by a large, almost empty room, in a room filled with the haunting sounds of Heitor Villa-Lobos’ “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5”. sung by countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo.
David Adrian Freeland Jr., a member of the LA Dance Project, is delighted to be able to offer online classes on the company’s app. But he’s a somber ghost in his new solo “It Could Have Been Me … It Could Be Me” (on the LA Dance Project website), which is performed at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in Los Angeles amid paintings by Amy Sherald becomes.
Joel Thompson’s The Seven Last Words of the Unarmed, recorded by the University of Michigan Men’s Glee Club, recalls the words and actions of Kenneth Chamberlain, Trayvon Martin, Amadou Diallo, Michael Brown and Oscar Grant III, John Crawford and Eric Garner . Mixing ballet and more contemporary techniques as he moves through the gallery spaces, Freeland offers a distinctive little portrait of each man in his final moments. It’s a moving homage – and a protest too.
Move: Yoga with Adriene
Is it that slightly hoarse voice that you once called “doing my best, Lauren Bacall”? Is it benji the dog? Is it their tenderness (“Hello my dear friends”) or their awareness that things may be getting too sensitive (“If you don’t relate to them at all, just breathe”)?
Whatever it is, Yoga With Adriene is an incredibly compelling series on YouTube that featured Adriene Mishler, a former actress who started posting videos in 2012, long before the pandemic made home exercise a necessity. Mishler offers sequences for “renewal”, “new beginning”, “uncertainty” and even for “when you feel dead inside”. There are months of courses, wake-up and sleep sequences, and everything in between.
Everyone is free and you can count on Mishler’s calm, humorous encouragement and lack of ego. There is no showing off, no pursuit of achievement, no leaving anyone out. That’s not to say that she doesn’t encourage you to aim high. As she often says, “If you fall, I’ll catch you.”
