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What Does a Dancing Physique Really feel Like in Ukraine? ‘I Am a Gun.’

What Does a Dancing Body Feel Like in Ukraine? ‘I Am a Gun.’

Anna Vinogradova, an independent dance artist living in Kyiv, doesn’t carry a gun. She’s not even particularly patriotic, she said. Her body, though, is speaking up. “It’s like, I am a gun,” she said, “and I am staying here to protect the city.”

She knows that she can’t actually defend people. She knows the army is in charge of that. “But with my presence, with my energy,” she said, “I’m fighting.”

Before the Russian invasion on Feb. 24, Vinogradova helped to run a small movement school for children. She had also become enamored of pole dancing, which led to a satirical work, combining standup and pole dancing, that she performed in a strip club. Vinogradova dressed as a miner — a homage to her hometown, Donetsk, which has been in conflict with Russia since 2014.

“I tried to look at my culture through pole dancing,” she said.

Times have changed. Now there is little opportunity for that kind of artistic reflection or for dance making. “This is life and death, and there are many things that need to be done,” said Larissa Babij, a Ukrainian American dancer who has lived in Ukraine since 2005 and now works at the foundation Heroes Ukraine to support a unit of the country’s Special Operations Forces.

Stories of Ukrainian ballet dancers have made headlines in the United States and Europe, but I was curious about Ukraine’s lesser-known contingent of independent dance artists and contemporary choreographers. Over the past few months, I have spoken to more than a dozen independent and experimental dance artists living in Ukraine, in video interviews and on WhatsApp, to discover more about what the scene was — small and underfunded, yet a network of people all the same — and what it has become.

Many dancers have left Ukraine to live and work elsewhere — most going to other parts of Europe. And many who have remained understandably don’t have dancing on their minds. There’s too much else to contend with, even when bombs aren’t dropping.

Some are using their knowledge of bodies and dance in practical ways to help the military (and themselves) contend with the mental stress and physical strain of war. Others are finding solace in the simple yet essential routines that hold the body together — sleeping and showering, stretching and breathing. Viktor Ruban, a dance artist, scholar and activist, said he views these as a somatic practice that comes “from the impulse of the body.”

He also spoke about crying. He is not a crier. But when tears come, he lets them flow.

“The amplitude of the emotions is so, so huge on a daily basis,” he said. “I experience from my body the tension in the chest and also some muscle spasms and trembling feet or trembling arms, palms. Just noticing what’s happening in the body is also helping a lot.”

Beyond securing Ukraine’s freedom, there isn’t a theme tying the stories of these artists together. How could there be? This is a war and they are individuals, reacting to it and to their own altered reality in different ways.

Dance artists have a particular sensitivity to the way trauma inhabits the body. Many I spoke to have experience in somatic work, which places a spotlight on the internal experience of moving: feeling sensations within the body. It’s less about changing your outward physicality and more about how movement affects you from the inside out. It can be robust or slow and methodical; it tends to be calming and centering. An aim is to unearth a greater awareness of and insight into the mind-body connection.

Mykyta Bay-Kravchenko, a dancer and teacher who lives in Lviv, has started to teach somatic classes focusing on what he called “static movement,” which facilitates connections among people, in part because of how he feels in his own body: At times, frantic.

“I feel like something is drumming inside,” he said, likening the sensation to Steve Reich’s minimalist, propulsive composition “Drumming.” “It’s not a good feeling of energy. We have terrible news every day. Every day something is bombed, and always you have it in your mind that today can be your last day.”

Other artists are volunteering in humanitarian and military efforts. After the Russian invasion began, Krystyna Shyshkarova, whose Totem Dance School in Kyiv is a prominent space for contemporary dance, left for a small town in the Vinnytsia area in west-central Ukraine, where she used her skills as a teacher and a choreographer to direct volunteers. Around that time, she described the way she felt as having a “cold anger inside — I’m like a machine a little bit.”

Since early May, Shyshkarova has been back in Kyiv, where she is teaching and choreographing at her school, although with a much smaller group of students. One of her studios is deep in the building. There are no windows. “It’s completely defended, like in a capsule,” she said, so when the alarms sound, “We are like, What can we do? Let the rockets fly and we’ll dance. It’s a strange feeling.”

She still does volunteer work, locating drones, thermal vision goggles and vests. One part of her studio is essentially a storage facility. But recently she has started to think about how she could help in a more specific, perhaps even lasting way.

“I start to see how many traumas the soldiers have,” Shyshkarova said, “and it’s not about the bullet, not about bombs. It’s because they run too much and something goes wrong with the back. Or they turn, and something is wrong with the knees.”

She and her husband, Yaroslav Kaynar, also a dancer, choreographer and teacher, began to take courses in tactical training. And she studied YouTube videos about how to manage weapons and to move with greater efficiency. “There are mechanical and good body patterns or healthy body patterns,” Shyshkarova said. “This is what we have in contemporary dance — we learn this from childhood.”

To better train those in the military, Shyshkarova is creating a system that she calls “tactical choreography” and is developing it with Andrii Polyarush, a soldier who lost a hand in March.

“He wants to be useful,” she said. “He wants to go back to the battlefield. I said, ‘Come on, you don’t have a hand. How you can do it?’ Stay here. Help me.”

Using a combination of modern dance techniques and tactical training, the program will feature preparatory exercises for civilians and military personnel to create healthy movement habits. Sitting down, standing up, rolling over — without injuring any joints — are not as simple as they sound. And try adding to that body armor and ammunition.

“How to fall quickly,” she said. “How to move parallel to the floor or change the position of the body without letting go of the weapon and without losing focus on the enemy.”

Reading Lynn Garafola’s recent biography of Bronislava Nijinska, I sensed a connection between the grit of these contemporary dance artists and the innovative spirit of Nijinska, who developed her progressive ideas about movement and dance working in Kyiv, starting in 1915. The sister of the brilliant dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, Nijinska was a member of Diaghilev’s groundbreaking Ballets Russes. But it was in Kyiv, away from her former ballet life in Russia, that her radical movement theories were formed. She and her experimental colleagues were ahead of their time: For her, the arts could let go of narrative. Dance didn’t need music; the body could exist on its own.

Nijinska formed her School of Movement in Kyiv, but left the country in 1921 because of political pressures. (Ukraine’s prolific avant-garde period — of which theater was always more prominent than dance — came to an end in the 1930s, suppressed by Stalin.)

Ruban is invested in preserving Ukrainian dance and theater heritage; his work grows out of the embers not just of Nijinska — with Svitlana Oleksiuk, another dance artist, he created a lecture-performance about the choreographer — but also of that experimental period more broadly.

For Ruban, who recently presented a version of an older piece — he said he finds it easier to look at past work and adapt it to the current climate — now it is not the time to delve into a deep creative process. “It’s really hard to find the movement and dance language to speak about the situation,” he said. “We do things that are more vital at this point.”

One thing he has done is start the Ukrainian Emergency Performing Arts Fund to provide financial assistance to artists. He has also begun working with Liudmyla Mova, a choreographer, psychologist and professor, on a new program that helps people in the military cope with physical and mental stress. “We’ll be giving work on body structure and centering,” he said, as well as on grounding, balancing and “many other applicable things from somatic work.”

Somatic methods are not alien to the military. Katja Kolcio, a somatic movement educator and a professor of dance at Wesleyan University, helped to develop a program in somatic resiliency during war and has worked closely with Ukrainian war-relief workers, the Ukrainian National Guard, Ukrainian Armed Forces and veterans.

“Somatic practices combine movement exploration with reflection in order to deepen awareness by drawing on our own inner wisdom and resilience,” Kolcio said.

The lived experiences, memories and the culture of participants matter. Those practices, she continued, “are particularly effective in the context of this war on Ukraine because they draw on the very resources that Putin is aiming to eradicate — Ukrainian cultural history and knowledge, passed down through generations of Ukrainian experience.”

It is through the arts, she said, that Ukrainians have been able to maintain a sense of selfhood, even when books and language were banned, and performances and artwork censored by the Soviets (as well as by Russia, long before Soviet times):“It was such an explicit attempt to erase a sense of Ukrainian-ness,” she said, and yet that was preserved “through the embroidery, through the chants and songs and movements.”

She added, “And so I think being able to finally feel one’s selfhood, it’s a physical act.”

At Soma, an independent space for movement exploration in Lviv, led by Olha Marusyn, somatic classes are offered, including a morning preparation. The word preparation is intentional. “You really prepare yourself for something, for anything,” she said. “And then we try to work with the body-mind connection, with attention, with knowing where you’re situated and what you’re looking at and what’s happening around.”

But dancing as an art continues in Ukraine, too. This month, the All-Ukrainian Association Contemporary Dance Platform presents “Let the Body Speak,” featuring dance videos by Ukrainian choreographers. Anton Ovchinnikov, a founder of the platform and an established Ukrainian choreographer and festival organizer, said it is “a kind of archive of, as we say, body memory. The idea is to edit these videos until the end of the war.”

Ovchinnikov estimates that 70 percent to 75 percent of Ukrainian choreographers have left the country for other parts of Europe. “Let the Body Speak” features their voices, too. (It is supported by the British Council and the Ukrainian Institute, and created in collaboration with the Place, a London organization for dance.) “Our idea is not about presenting it in Ukraine, but abroad,” Ovchinnikov said, as a way to “represent Ukrainian contemporary dance.”

Not everyone thought it was a good idea. “There were a group of dancers who told us that now is not the time to present dance or dance videos,” he said.

But Ovchinnikov said everyone must decide for themselves whether to make dances now. “It’s very, very private,” he said. “It’s important that this decision should be outside of any of the opinions or restrictions.”

There is also the question of what Ukrainian contemporary dance is. Especially in this moment. Of course, there is still ballet and folk dance. (At the National Opera of Ukraine in Kyiv, ballet performances have resumed, though at a smaller scale until more dancers become available.) There are street dancers in Kyiv who raise money for war efforts. The contact improvisation scene in Kyiv was described to me as being strong and well organized — as much of a social club as a dancing community. Yet what some see as contemporary work is not avant-garde, but commercial dance more aligned to what you might see on the TV show “So You Think You Can Dance.”

What can dance, as an art form, mean under these circumstances? For the young choreographer Danylo Zubkov, who leads a group in Kyiv, Ukrainian contemporary dance can only be created now by dance artists living in the country since the Russian invasion on Feb. 24. And that means starting from scratch. As he sees it, now is the time for the birth of authentic, essential Ukrainian contemporary dance. To be an independent artist, he says, is about trying to create something new. “When you do not question yourself,” he said, “you cannot find it.”

He works regularly with his dancers, but it’s early days: He said he doesn’t have the words to describe his work now. But what he does know is that it has nothing to do with generating choreographic material for a show. He wants to usher in a new era of dance; to him, that’s what being an independent artist is all about. “And this new is not connected with anything,” he said. “Me and my friends are not making dance just as a way to forget about the reality. We are trying to save it as something more.”

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JoJo Siwa to Have First Identical-Intercourse ‘Dancing With the Stars’ Accomplice

JoJo Siwa to Have First Same-Sex ‘Dancing With the Stars’ Partner

On Thursday, “Dancing With the Stars” story was made with the announcement that dancer and social media personality JoJo Siwa would be the first candidate on the ABC program to run with a same-sex partner.

Executive producer Andrew Llinares announced the milestone during a panel of the television critics association “Dancing With the Stars”.

(The show also announced that gymnast and Olympic gold medalist Suni Lee would be in her 30th season and that other celebrity contestants would be featured on Good Morning America on September 8. The season kicks off on September 20. )

“I have a girlfriend who is the love of my life and who is everything to me,” Siwa told USA Today in an article published Thursday. “My journey of getting out and having a girlfriend has inspired so many people around the world.”

“I thought if I did choose to dance with a girl on this show it would break the stereotype,” she said, adding that it would be “new, different” and a “change for the better.”

Siwa emerged as part of the LGBTQ community earlier this year when she posted a photo of herself on Instagram wearing a t-shirt that said, “Best Gay Cousin Ever”. In April, she told people that “technically I would say that I am pansexual”.

On the judging panel for the Critics Association, model and TV personality Tyra Banks – who hosts and executive producer of “Dancing With the Stars” – said she supports the move.

“You make history, JoJo,” she said. “This is life changing for so many people. Especially because you are so young. That you say this is who you are and it’s beautiful, I’m so proud of you. “

Siwa, known for her sparkling hair accessories and bubbly personality, met her friend Kylie Prew on a cruise. They started dating in January and by June LGBTQ advocacy group Glaad had them on their 20 Under 20 list.

Glaad’s talent boss Anthony Allen Ramos praised the show’s move on Thursday in a statement. “At the age of 18, JoJo Siwa used her platform again to inspire and promote the LGBTQ community,” he said. “As one of the most watched and acclaimed television shows, ‘Dancing With the Stars’ and Tyra Banks make the right decision to show JoJo Siwa alongside a professional dancer.”

“The show has such a wide, wide-ranging audience,” he said, “and there is a real opportunity here for people to celebrate same-sex pairing and to root JoJo and all LGBTQ youth.”

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At Rockaway, Dancing for the Sea, the Sky, the Sand and the Birds

At Rockaway, Dancing for the Sea, the Sky, the Sand and the Birds

“The beach is a moody place, you know?” the choreographer Moriah Evans said.

Rockaway Beach, stretched under a sky of filmy clouds, was certainly in a mood last Friday as waves sprouted higher and higher and the squawks of sea gulls were interrupted by the alarming beeps of a weather alert. “Whoa, what is that?” Evans asked before muttering under her breath, “Get out now.”

A storm was brewing, but Evans was only mildly agitated. It is what it is. The backdrop of her newest work, a one-off, is the ocean. She’s giving spontaneity a serious whirl.

In the aptly named “Repose,” 21 dancers will progress from Beach 86th to Beach 110th Streets in Queens on Sunday starting at 1 p.m. Performing several movement scores drawn from everyday actions and responses to nature at the beach, the dancers will travel 1.4 miles over the course of six hours. Evans would agree that this is unusual for her: “I’m not some outdoor performance aficionado,” she said.

And to pull it off, she realized she can’t count on anything, from the weather to the beachgoers. “If it’s a cold day and rainy, the relationship to the public is going to be entirely different,” she said. “But conceptually, for me, we’re not performing this to be seen. I say this as a kind of wish for the work: We’re actually doing this for the waves, for the horizon, for the sky, for the sand, for the birds that pass by.”

Throughout August, Evans has held rehearsals with her stellar, multigenerational cast, but never with more than two dancers at the same time. The process is “very go and do,” she said, as the performance will be. “It’s not like I’m rehearsing it again and again. I’m also excited because I don’t know what this piece is going to be really. We’ll see what happens. I don’t know what’s going to happen!”

That’s all for the better. Aren’t you in the mood for something fresh? This won’t be another one of those mixed bills of dancers displaying how happy they are to be dancing again. “Repose,” commissioned by Sasha Okshteyn for her Beach Sessions Dance Series, isn’t just another site-specific work. It’s a vital, visceral response to our current moment that looks at the ways in which the body — whether dancing, moving or in repose — can energize an outdoor space. And outdoor spaces are all the more important during the pandemic.

Okshteyn said that after the past year and a half she wanted to produce something “a little bit more investigative, that’s not so like in your face dancing, but that’s more meditative and accessible.”

The communal aspect of the beach is part of it, too. “I’ll be interested to see how accessible it is,” Okshteyn said. “It’s called ‘Repose’ — she’s looking at the leisurely positions of the beachgoers, so it is very accessible because it’s kind of pedestrian movement — but it will be interesting to see what people think of it. Is it too abstract?”

Evans’s work — internal and probing, with movement emanating from deep in the body — possesses a rawness that fits in nature. It also has a way of being both solemn and lushly free. To Evans, the beach is a theater of the flesh. Her method of framing everyday actions and amplifying them is emotional, joyful, earthy and even humorous. “Repose” is about giving into feeling and the elements; in doing so, Evans takes dance to a different place.

Her magnetic cast — full of stars of downtown dance — is an important part of the journey and includes Iréne Hultman, Marc Crousillat, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, Niall Jones, Jess Pretty and Antonio Ramos. What Hultman, a choreographer and former member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, appreciates most about Evans’s work is that she goes into the unknown. “I’m looking forward to being in between land and water and then to have the air,” she said, “and to to be almost like a herd of animals.”

Evans’s evolving movement scores feature “mirroring,” or copying the acts of people on the beach; and “crawl rock roll position,” in which the performers crawl like an insect or an animal; become as inanimate as a stone; and roll into the ocean as taut as a log or as stretched and supple as a highly trained dancer.

The “rock” moment from “crawl rock roll” — each component can be separated to be its own score — is one of those actions that sometimes leads to a parks department employee pausing to ask if everything is OK. It has a lifeless quality and sometimes the look of child’s pose in yoga, with the arms pinned to the sides. It happens in the sand.

During one rehearsal, Evans explained to the dancer Daria Faïn that she was looking for containment — to think about a contraction.

“Like Martha à la New Age,” she said with enthusiasm, referring to Martha Graham, whose deep pelvic contractions were a hallmark of her dances. “Like contraction into inanimate matter!”

For another score, the cast members have the option of performing something entirely personal. In that same rehearsal session, Evans asked Faïn, “Do you have a beach dance fantasy?” Her first wish was to be able to swim into the sea — really far. Alas, lifeguards at Rockaway don’t go for that sort of thing.

Faïn paused while scooping wet sand onto her legs. “I would like to be buried,” she said. “That is a huge fantasy.”

Sorted. As for some others? Anh Vo will wail at the ocean’s edge. Alex Rodabaugh will perform cartwheels in the water. This fantasy score was inspired by Evans’s original idea for the work: “It was to have 100 naked bodies on the beach kind of hanging out the way sea lions hang out on the cove,” she said. “Just being in a state of repose.”

It gives you a window into her agile imagination. “That didn’t happen,” she added. “So now this is happening.”

During rehearsals, beachgoers stared and sometimes laughed. Many drifted away, but a few asked what was going on. Evans would tell them, “I’m just reframing your actions as a dance” or talk about how they are engaging with “the dance of the everyday.” She tells her performers — if they are questioned — to make eye contact and to be open. “Like spread joy,” Evans said. “But don’t get distracted or start into what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and talking about is it art or not art? Let the people have that conversation. It’s not our job.”

But for the performance itself, the dancers won’t fade into the seascape so easily: They will be wearing green bathing suits in the same Pantone shade (PMS 368) of those who work in the parks department. The costumes are credited to the Bureau for the Future of Choreography and Amber Evans (Moriah’s sister), and they pop. Eric Peterson, the parks administrator for Rockaway, appreciates the homage.

“It’s picking up the elements, the flavors of the beach and of the parks department — of what we do,” Peterson said. “And it’s picking up those elements while not usurping — they’re not dancing in staff uniforms, they’re incorporating elements of the color palette.”

All the while, Evans is aware of the invisible choreography of the beach. When the lifeguards blow their whistles at 6 p.m. to leave, it’s a signal for everyone to get out of the water. It’s also when the sea gulls know it’s prime time to hunt for trash. In that final hour — because the lifeguards have gone off-duty, amplified sound is permitted — the musician and composer David Watson will present a sonic sunset score with live performance as well as prerecorded audio and field recordings.

When Evans thinks about “Repose” she is considering everything — nature, park workers and beach behavior with its small, group arrangements and configurations — as a horizontal mass. “What is the purpose of the theater?” she said. “Sometimes I think it’s just a frame to hold people together in an experience. And in that way, I find the beach is also doing that: We’re in a shared framework.”

Fittingly, audience members are invited to follow the performers as they progress or even to create their own movement experiences. Evans has created a comic strip that shows 16 actions for “Repose.” There are instructions for small events, like: “Recline at the shoreline, relax into a position, stay there until the waves crash and move your body into a new position.”

There’s a reason the comic, featuring illustrations by Jeffrey Lewis, ends with a line that reads, “A performance by Moriah Evans and you and them and us and many people for Beach Seasons 2021.” It’s inclusive because to Evans, art is made by people as well as artists.

“People attending a performance make the performance happen or contribute to it what is,” she said. “I think it will happen inevitably in a public space like this. And you really can’t control the conditions. We cannot control the weather or the lights or the behavior of the public in relationship to it. Giving up control in that way is a good thing.”

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Assessment: In ‘You Are Right here,’ Dancing and Splashing at Lincoln Middle

Review: In ‘You Are Here,’ Dancing and Splashing at Lincoln Center

As dance regains its foothold in the performing arts this summer – little by little, with determination and the best of intentions – putting on a show has a different weight to it. How exactly does the show have to go on? Who is responsible and who gets the credit? If the last year and a half has taught us anything, it’s to pay attention to those on the edge, to recalibrate who and what is important. Art and artists, for sure. But it takes more than an artist to make art a reality.

You Are Here, a sculpture and sound installation commissioned by Lincoln Center at Hearst Plaza, contains audio portraits of the composer and sound artist Justin Hicks. The piece reveals the pandemic experiences of artists as well as people who work behind the scenes, including Lila Lomax, who works at Lincoln Center Security – and sings while at work – Cassie Mey, who works in the dance department of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and Valarie Wong, a nurse at the New York Presbyterian Hospital. The backdrop is also adorned with fabric sculptures by the stage designer Mimi Lien, whose headless shapes, a structural mix of fabric and dried and fresh flowers, sprout across the square like avant-garde scarecrows.

On Saturday night, it turns into a live performance where some of these New Yorkers become part of the piece and express personal ruminations about their pandemic experience, along with dancers from Gallim, a company led by Andrea Miller. She directs “You Are Here” with Lynsey Peisinger, which also contains choreography and a concept by Miller.

Layered and lengthy, it’s an attempt to look into the past while celebrating the possibility of the future. Water is important. Much of it takes place in the Paul Milstein Pool, which stretches across the square.

The pool is a tempting place for choreographers. Who doesn’t want to splash around in the water? But the problem for the viewer is that it is much more exciting to be in the water than to watch others in it. Throughout the performance, the choreography places dancers – who wear Oana Botez’s snug, shimmering sequin shorts and tops, a clever allusion to fish scales – into their depths. But whether they penetrate one another, fall backwards or of course hit its surface, a certain monotony arises.

Sometimes this overloaded staging seems more like a podcast with interwoven dances than a poetic exploration of the here and now. Moments were more memorable than the whole when Jermaine Greaves, founder of Black Disabled Lives Matter who works for accessibility at Lincoln Center, spoke lovingly about his mother teaching him resilience and spinning in his wheelchair in a dance of joy.

Susan Thomasson, a dancer who works with Lincoln Center Education, spoke live and in a voice-over about “soft but prickly grass, slick metal, still with the afternoon heat and a light breeze on my cheek”, noting as she approached the edge of a grassy hill, touched a railing and opened her arms like wings. Then, when she talked about the migration of wild geese, she turned into herself with undeniable ardor, took high steps and repeated her loud honking before sliding herself into the water. (She had Moira Rose’s trust.)

In between the dancers slipped into the water again and again – they stretched out their arms and turned their upper bodies while they immersed themselves in expressive choreographies; occasionally one swept the square, both the sidewalk and the water, holding a white cloth like a cloak in one hand, as if to clear the square. The work ended on a high note, with a scene with ballroom icon Egyptt LaBeija and a loud dance – really a pool party – to Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna to Dance With Somebody”.

The most impressive achievement, however, came from Valarie Wong, a nurse in an intensive care unit at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, who spoke of being consumed by fear and anxiety.

As she told her story – it also included how she would prepare patients to die while “trying to send them away with dignity” – she walked around three sides of the square and cut into the water for the fourth. “I’m more present now than ever,” she said. “I used to always look to the future. But the gift is the gift. “

In “You Are Here”, Wong, who specializes in the heart – both medically and, as it turned out, in other areas – led us into a room that was as contemplative as it was exploratory. In a way, this was the truest ending that got you thinking.

“You Are Here” continues until July 30th at Hearst Plaza.

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Evaluate: The Charms and Pitfalls of Dancing the Gods on Digital camera

Review: The Charms and Pitfalls of Dancing the Gods on Camera

Since 2011, the World Music Institute’s Dancing the Gods festival has consistently delivered high-quality Indian dance to New York. Last year, like so much else, it was canceled. This year, like so much else, it’s virtual — which means that another stage experience is being mediated by cameras, with all the attendant possibilities and pitfalls.

In at least one respect, classical Indian dance should benefit from the camera’s eye. One of its glories is storytelling, often concentrated in facial expressions — details that close-ups can magnify. But just as a stage actor’s performance pitched to the second balcony can seem too broad, too loud, when it fills a screen, so can a dancer’s.

That’s what I came to feel about Rama Vaidyanathan’s contribution. Vaidyanathan appears on a porch in Delhi, embodying three women in love in three Bharatanatyam pieces titled “Vexed,” “Arrogant” and “Anxious.” (The festival, available on demand for the next three weeks, comes in two installments, each featuring a headliner filmed in India and an opening act who’s a New York local.)

As is common, Vaidyanathan introduces each dance with a synopsis. That’s helpful for those who don’t know the story or language of the accompanying song, but also useful for anyone wanting to track how a simple scenario can be elaborated and expanded into song and dance. Perhaps it was the true-confessions tone of her synopses that put me off. “I knew something was wrong when my friends started behaving strangely with me,” begins one, a story of a woman whose lover kisses and tells, “the worst thing that can happen to a woman.”

Vaidyanathan is a masterful artist, but in the collapsed distance of film, her program’s emphasis on what the text called “feminine wiles” was too much: too much eye-rolling, too much attitude. Only in the final episode, when her character is extolling the beauty of her lover, Krishna, did the dance expand and vibrate with the energy of a god.

In the second program, Surupa Sen appears at Nrityagram, the village in southern India where she has lived and worked for three decades. She, too, offers three solos in her style, Odissi; three poems from the Gita Govinda; three depictions of women in love with gods. But these achieve an immediacy and intimacy suited to the closer view.

The first is a prepandemic stage performance, which shows Sen’s authority in her usual setting. But I preferred the second two: gorgeous compositions choreographed by the Odissi guru Kelucharan Mohapatra and filmed in a cozy dance studio at Nrityagram.

In one, the woman waits in a bower for her lover, adorning herself, and the anticipation, so strong it hurts, comes through in the physicality and rhythms of the dance. If that’s before, the final piece is after, a postcoital scene. Here, the languor and softness of Sen’s performance are very far from the stagy attitudes of Vaidyanathan. The camera captures something close to emotional nakedness.

That’s a gain for a virtual festival, whereas the festival’s opening acts are mostly misfires. In “Willow,” the New Jersey-based Kathak dancer Jin Won goes in for double exposures and crass music reminiscent of a cheap horror film; it buries her skill. In “The Sun Unto a Day,” the Bharatanatyam dancer Sonali Skandan places herself in cyclorama void like the one on “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver”; it exposes her imprecision.

Dancing the Gods

Through June 12 (Program 1) and June 13 (Program 2), worldmusicinstitute.org.

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Dancing for Many Cameras, within the Spherical: ‘It’s Muybridge on Steroids’

Dancing for Many Cameras, in the Round: ‘It’s Muybridge on Steroids’

In mid-2020, Herman Cornejo, one of the best male dancers of his generation, lost his mojo. The company he dances for, the American Ballet Theater, had to close its studios due to the pandemic. He was fed up with exercising at home alone on a 5 by 7 foot square of vinyl flooring provided by the Ballet Theater. “If I do a single Grand Jeté” – one of the powerful, spacious jumps for which it is known – “I end up next to the wall,” he said at the time.

“I pushed myself to keep going until I realized that pushing myself would only make me worse,” he said recently. For the first time since he started dancing when he was 8, he took a break. It was then that he realized he had to create something of his own, he said.

Personal appearances were not an option. The dance films he’d seen were unsatisfactory – too shallow, too impersonal. Instead, he was determined to come up with something that “brings people closer to dancers,” he said, “that brings you into the same room with them and allows you to move around in the space”. Technology offered one possible solution.

With this in mind, he turned to the photographer, filmmaker and self-proclaimed “photo scientist” Steven Sebring, who had produced a short dance film for Cornejo’s 20th anniversary at the Ballet Theater.

Their new collaboration “DANCELIVE by Herman Cornejo” will be shown on Saturday on the Veeps website, an online performance platform. It will consist of two dances recorded by Sebring with an in-the-round camera system developed by Sebring in his laboratory in the city center, as well as rehearsal material to give viewers an impression of how the material was created.

A dance is a duet that the choreographer Joshua Beamish created for Cornejo and his colleague Skylar Brandt. the other, a solo developed by Cornejo for himself, plays Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”. Both involve ways to see the dancers that you can’t get in a theater: you can see them up close and see their movements from all sides and angles, the visual equivalent of surround sound. You can see them moving, seemingly on different planes and at different speeds, or floating in the air as if time were being extended.

QR codes (those square barcodes that look like a strange postage stamp) allow viewers to use their phones to interact with the online images, moving them back and forth, or converting them to augmented reality.

Still, this first sample will only give a small taste of the bigger experiences Cornejo and Sebring have in mind.

Over the past decade, Sebring, who has worked with fashion brands, bands, galleries, and museums and made the award-winning film Patti Smith: Dream of Life in 2008, has developed a method to capture his Eadweard-inspired motifs in Muybridge’s photographic motion studies of the late 19th century. These studies, called chronophotographs, were sequential series of photos of animals and people jumping, walking (or dancing). Shown together, they documented every phase of movement.

Like Muybridge, Sebring takes a series of still images – he calls them “pure moments of reality” – with cameras set up in a circle. With the help of digital technology, he then arranges them into sequences that suggest an immersive, three-dimensional and even four-dimensional space and movement. (What he calls four-dimensional recording are images that track movement through space over time and create overlapping impressions, such as the phases of movement in Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase”.)

“It’s Muybridge versus steroids,” he said recently during a Zoom tour of his workshop.

Over time, the two artists hope to create a virtual performance space that builds on the capabilities of video game platforms. It will offer subscribers movies, stills, and live streams of the creation process, “almost like being on a reality show,” Cornejo said. The audience can see the dances in augmented reality (as if the dancers were in their room) or in virtual reality (as if they were in the dancers’ room).

But all of this will take time and money. This first version is just a first step.

Cornejo and Sebring aren’t the first to work on immersive and augmented reality dance experiences. “What they are doing is very much in line with the latest developments in volumetric video technology,” said filmmaker Alla Kovgan, who directed the 3-D dance documentary “Cunningham,” in a recent interview. “During a standard volumetric video recording, the dancer is filmed from every possible direction and then converted into a 3D model that is similar to the actual dancer or can be used to create a different character.”

She added, “In both cases the goal is to preserve the authenticity and nuance of the dancers’ performance and free the audience from a single fixed point of view.”

But because the basic unit in Sebring’s system is still photography instead of film, the process is faster and cheaper than volumetric video. This also means that he can have a small team – “DANCELIVE” consists of around 10 people – with tighter artistic control and the ability to react to and adapt the material with little effort.

Cornejo and Sebring began their collaboration in November in the Sebring Cabinet of Curiosities in a building on the Lower East Side that housed a variety house, the Clinton Theater, at the beginning of the 20th century. Much of the space is taken up by Sebring’s devices: handcrafted towers of his own design for viewing holograms at comfortable heights, a multi-screen control table, and a futuristic-looking thing he calls the Sebring Revolution System.

The wooden revolutionary system rises like a giant cylinder 30 feet in diameter with walls the height of three people standing end to end. Over 100 still cameras are embedded in these walls.

When you enter – as I did virtually – it looks like a strange, pure white capsule, the walls of which are only interrupted by round portholes for the cameras and the outline of the door.

Skylar Brandt, Cornejo’s dance partner in “New York Alive”, the Beamish piece, described the feeling of dancing with Cornejo in the top hat. “We went in, just the two of us, and performed on the white walls for hours,” she said in a telephone interview. “It was a bit like dancing in space.”

But the longer they danced in the circular room, Cornejo said, the more they found their bearings. “I could hear the cameras shooting around me,” he said, “and they became like the audience looking in.”

A 15-minute dance produces more than 20,000 still images captured around the dancers over the course of several dozen revolutions – the “revolutions” after which the Sebring Revolution takes its name.

The footage captured by the cameras is played back almost instantly on screens in the studio, which means it can be edited in real time. It is like bringing Leonardo’s “Vitruvian Man” to life in motion and in three dimensions.

In November, Beamish worked with Cornejo’s team in the studio for three weeks – a leisurely pace for the ballet world – trying to find ways to play with the camera effects. “I let go of the idea of ​​creating a piece that would work on stage and thought about what was the most compelling in front of the camera,” he said.

Filming was a process of discovery. “Ballet can be so strict,” says Cornejo. “Working with Steven has helped me deconstruct and open up what I’ve been doing for so long.” A situation beyond his control has forced him to loosen his control over what he is doing and use new tools to find new ways of looking at his craft.

It also provided a reason to go back to the studio. As Sebring put it, “This is a time for artists. We have to take care of ourselves. “

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She’s the Dancing Pressure Behind Nia Dennis’s Viral Gymnastics Routines

She’s the Dancing Force Behind Nia Dennis’s Viral Gymnastics Routines

The University of California Los Angeles Bruins gymnastics team has more than one secret weapon. Yes, there is Nia Dennis, whose floor routine, a lush and powerful celebration of black culture, went viral last week. The team also has another rising star: the choreographer Bijoya Das.

BJ, as she is called, has been the Bruins’ volunteer assistant trainer since 2019. As a former gymnast, she also has a deep relationship with dance. A commercial dancer and choreographer who has lived in Los Angeles since 2007, she has performed with Beyoncé, Pink, Usher, Avril Lavigne and others.

But she also loves when dance is paired with something else, like wrestling – her choreography was featured on season two of “Glow” – and especially gymnastics, where dance is part of the artistic part of an athlete’s score, to which too the execution belongs, technique and composition.

At the college level, dance is an important part: it connects a routine and lets a gymnast’s personality shine on the mat. As Das explained, the dance element is subjective and usually not an area where many deductions are made. But it’s important. At UCLA, she continues a strong dance tradition, following the path of former Bruins head coach Valorie Kondos Field, who, Das said, “came to UCLA as a ballet dancer and choreographer who knew nothing about gymnastics. ”

She made the team dance, just like Das does now with her gripping floor routines, including two viral performances by Dennis. The first and last season was set for a Beyoncé medley. This year, inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and last summer’s protests, includes Kendrick Lamar’s “Humble”; Missy Elliott’s “Pass That Dutch”; and Monica with The Franchize Boyz ‘”Everytime tha Beat Drop”, one of Dennis’ most popular TikToks.

During the 90 seconds of the floor routine, Dennis sails through tumbling passes – all the more impressive since she underwent shoulder surgery in June – and weaves the dance non-stop. She begins on a stern remark by taking one knee, raising a fist in the air, and rising to salute the Wakanda Forever. “Then she meets a little Nae Nae and a Woah,” said Das, referring to TikTok movements. “It’s legendary new age hip hop. She just loves to dance so we thought it would be fun. “

Dennis got electrified last year and has become even more fluid when it comes to combining dance and gymnastics. The seamless routine includes moments from TikTok dances as well as some steps, the percussive tradition found in black fraternities and sororities. It was inspired by Dennis’ father who helped out by sending out tutorials.

One of the most beautiful moments comes when Das faces Dennis in a cameo and dances with her. They had just changed the timing of how Dennis would get out of a fall pass and she was nervous about missing it.

“We all do the routines on the sidelines anyway,” said Das. “Now I feel like at every meeting of the season, I’ll stand there and do that to her. It’s like our thing now. “

Dennis, who said she found movement a form of freedom, was inspired by That. “I try to be like you, to move like you,” she said in an interview. “She definitely knows how to choreograph for each individual. It’s so hard to do. Not everyone can dance the same way. Not everyone can really dance, you know “

Dennis’s accomplishments aren’t the only UCLA athletes to go viral. In 2016 it was Sophina DeJesus; in 2019 Katelyn Ohashi. This is a team of individuals. Look for Margzetta Frazier – another incredible gymnast-dancer who will soon be introducing a new that routine – and for Chae Campbell, who is even-tempered, bright and just a newbie.

That’s proud of them all. She started gymnastics at the age of 6 and was continuing her sophomore year at the University of Washington when an Achilles tear forced her to quit. “It was a sudden end to my career that I definitely didn’t want,” she said.

After recovering, she told herself if she couldn’t be a gymnast she would become a dancer, something she always loved. “I started taking dance classes in Seattle and I really fell in love with hip-hop,” she said. “I also used jazz funk. I had so much fun finding joy in something. “

And she continues to enjoy dancing even during the pandemic. The one who created the movement for the new video for the Sam Feldt-Kesha collaboration “Stronger” – it’s about finding strength in difficult times and includes a fight sequence – also choreographed the Bruins intro video this season, another Festival for gymnastics and dance.

Recently Das spoke about their approach to the Bruins, how their commercial career influenced their choreography, and about the sensational Dennis who, by the way, didn’t choose to train for the Olympics.

What follows are edited excerpts from this conversation.

Do you want to change the gymnastics?

I think less and less about it: How can I change every athlete for the better and how can I change the program for the better? But when I saw how Nia’s routine had affected people, I realized that I might have a bigger purpose with all of this, and that it’s not just about getting good results and bringing out cool moves.

It’s more about inspiring people to reach their full potential, pursuing their dreams or trying something they thought they couldn’t do because of the color of their skin or because it doesn’t fit into shape.

How do you work with the gymnasts?

They all had a very tough year. I just want the routines to please them and make them happy. This year it wasn’t really about pleasing people or doing what the judges or the gymnastics critics want. It was more about what would make you feel good as an athlete?

In our team we do a studio on Mondays, where I teach a dance class. Having some type of dance training helps with coordination and balance and working through the feet.

I feel like Nia took this workout really seriously. I think she played more of a character last year. It worked and it was a great time watching. This year I feel like she is playing herself: how she lies on the ground is how she is in life.

How did your commercial dance experience get into gymnastics?

One thing that is very important to me is musicality and timing. Not only do we aimlessly strike poses and dance moves and move through the music. We actually hit accents and beats and I want the timing to look good. I’m in a lot of them about that.

Your title confuses me. Are you really a volunteer?

Yes. There are a lot of different rules in the NCAA. And one of the rules in gymnastics is that you are only allowed to have three paid trainers on staff. Often the volunteer trainer is the choreographer.

Wow. This is just so wrong!

You know how dancers are: you just follow your heart because you loved it and then you make bad business decisions along the way.

How do you find a balance between dance and technical skills in a routine?

There are certain college gymnastics requirements they must have, and it is usually two or three fall passes depending on how difficult they are. And then they have to meet a jump requirement. Everything else is dance and art. I choreograph the split times and make them fun to see.

Do gymnasts have more freedom to dance in college than in international competition?

I don’t think it’s freedom.

So the international competition is just boring for me?

[Laughs] These international gymnasts need to do more tricks. It just leaves less time for performance and less energy can be used for it. But it is also the culture of elite gymnastics. When you notice, many of them don’t smile; They don’t actually occur. You just do these in-between movements and poses.

I have noticed!

There are some international elites who are extremely artistic on the ground, but the culture is usually a bit more classic and maybe ballet based. So you won’t actually see people doing the woah in their elite routine – as much as it would be really fun for someone to just shake them up.

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Mads Mikkelsen Dancing Days Have been Over Till ‘One other Spherical’

Mads Mikkelsen Dancing Days Were Over Until ‘Another Round’

Martin is a history teacher with the listless, sloping posture of a comma. He walks slowly, as if every step causes a pain in the ass. His job is not very inspiring; his marriage is falling apart. “Am I getting bored?” he asks his wife. “Do you find me boring?”

Her answer seems to confirm what he already knows: “You are not the same Martin I first met.”

In Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s “Another Round”, a film about breaking the rules and thus freeing oneself, Martin is one of four high school teachers who decide to test a theory about alcohol: as long as they maintain a uniform theory Level of it in their blood, their life will get better.

The experiment has its problems. But in the end Martin, played by Mads Mikkelsen, finds a release that is expressed in a dance at the end of the film. The slightly drunk dance shows Mikkelsen’s nimble ability to balance daring and control. It fits: he was once a professional dancer.

The dance begins after Martin, who had a history of jazz ballet classes, attended a friend’s funeral and received text messages from his wife suggesting a reunion. He and his friends greet the graduates at the harbor while the song “What a Life” by the Danish band Scarlet Pleasure plays. At first, its movement is a little tentative, full of stops and starts. But as soon as he starts, he throws himself in, makes wide crossed steps, sways and turns with silky strength to the ground and jumps up – while taking a sip from a can of beer.

As his body melts to the beat of the song, it is clear that this is more than a dance: Martin has been given another chance – or round – in life and he is taking it. The 55-year-old Mikkelsen jumps unrestrained and robust through space, hits the air and jumps powerfully before making a spectacular jump over the water. The film ends with him in the air.

In collaboration with Mikkelsen, the choreographer Olivia Anselmo said: “He started the whole rehearsal with the words: ‘Well, I’m not like I used to be, I’m no longer young and blah, blah, blah. ‘And then the first thing he does is go into a slide and roll on the floor and jump up and do this thing where he put his leg around the other leg – like a yoga pose. He just did it. “

Mikkelsen started out as an acrobat before discovering dance, despite making a name for himself as an actor. He was the Bond villain at Casino Royale and Dr. Hannibal Lecter in the television series “Hannibal”. For his role in Vinterberg’s film “The Hunt” (2012) he won a prize for best actor in Cannes. But for Anselmo it is different. “When I was in the studio with him, I didn’t think, wow, this is this world famous actor,” she said. “It was so cozy and relaxed. I just thought this is just another dancer. “

Recently Mikkelsen spoke about dance and his professional dance years, which lasted around nine years. Switching to drama, he said, “to pull out another drawer and find something new,” he said. “I was always more in love with the drama of dancing than with the aesthetics of dancing.”

What follows are edited excerpts from a recent conversation.

How was it for you to dance in the movie?

I thought it would be difficult to get away with a realistic movie – to really dance. In my world it was more like a drunken dream or a drunken picture or a drunken fantasy, but in Thomas’ world it was literally a man dancing while surrounded by many young people. [Laughs]

He wanted the ending to be a balance between a flying man and a falling man, and obviously the dance was perfect for that.

How did you get into dancing in the first place?

I started as a gymnast and a choreographer came to our club. She wanted some acrobats in the background who could flip, and she wanted us to take a few steps too. She thought I had some talent and asked me if I wanted to learn the trade and I had absolutely nothing else to do.

I did a couple of shows with her, musical things, and then it just felt like I had to honor the dance. I really had to learn from the grassroots.

Where did you go to college?

I applied for a scholarship and spent two summers in New York with Martha Graham. Then I joined a contemporary ballet company in Denmark and did a lot of musicals like “La Cage Aux Folles” and “Chicago”. “West Side Story.” But I was trained as a Martha Graham contemporary dancer.

Was Martha there? She must have been pretty old.

Yes. I had the opportunity to meet her. It was a wonder time. She obviously wasn’t a teacher [anymore]but she once came along with her arthritis for the guru she was. She was helped out of the car. She was breathtaking. She had this huge hair. She sat on the floor and watched us. And suddenly she did just one more move – her spine just straightened and she put her nose on the floor.

That’s magic.

We were all like what? And then all the boys came very close because she didn’t speak aloud. She said, “The boys have to jump in the air.” And so we went in there and jumped and jumped and jumped and then we looked at her and she was asleep. [Laughs] But it was fantastic to get to know her.

When did you start doing gymnastics?

I was probably in first or second grade. You have to understand that gymnastics in Denmark in the sense that we sucked was on a completely different level than the rest of the world. I remember a Russian club came to us as a friendship club and it was just crazy how good they were. It was just like this, Jesus, we are wasting our time.

How old were you when you switched to dancing?

I think it was around 5 or 6 when that happened. So I was a working class little boy – almost like a Billy Elliot story. I couldn’t really tell my friends what I was doing. That’s how it is when you’re a working class kid, but when they finally found out I told them to do the math, “How many girls, how many boys?” They all said: “Yes, I want to be a dancer too.”

How was it dancing for “Another Round” again?

It was like saying hello to an old friend. I’m the type of dancer who doesn’t dance when I’m in a club with friends. I’ve always been a little reluctant because I think it was my job. I knew this character was rusty and he wasn’t a professional dancer like me, but he’d done it as a young man, as a kid. At the same time, I got a little ambitious.

Did you hurt yourself

No not at all. It was all good. But it was all adrenaline. I felt very young again, but for the next week I felt very old.

Because you were sore

I was super sore. I do a lot of sport. I ride my bike and play tennis and do all sorts of things, but they’re not the same muscles.

What did you think of in the last dance?

We wanted it not to be about the dance, but about what’s in the character. It’s more than a performance, it’s an internal journey. It’s almost like a close-up.

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Dancing by Herself: When the Waltz Went Solo

Dancing by Herself: When the Waltz Went Solo

The rolling can go on in an endless rotation for hours as the partners move in each other’s arms on a crowded dance floor. It requires considerable levels of physical contact, which is why the waltz was considered a guilty pleasure until the early 19th century when its popularity eventually plunged appropriateness. And now during the coronavirus pandemic, the close partner dance is raising its eyebrows again.

In Vienna, the home of the waltz, a wave of cancellations has ended the annual ball season. Hundreds of luxurious celebrations are usually held across the city in January and February, including a New Year’s Eve ball, the Hofburg Silvesterball, in the Imperial Palace. The lockdowns began shortly after this year’s events ended. Planning for a new season’s programs came to a halt.

The waltz may have a reputation for being the ultimate partner ballroom dance – as it is traditionally performed at the balls – but there is another interpretation that resonates in this pandemic year of physical distancing. More than a century ago, the Viennese dancer Grete Wiesenthal transformed the waltz into a powerful form of solo movement.

When Wiesenthal first performed her choreography with its swirling, euphoric movement and the floating arches of the body, she became an advocate of free dance in Vienna and a cultural force in the city’s highest artistic circles.

Although her name is not usually found among internationally known pioneers of modern dance such as Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis and Loie Fuller, Wiesenthal is revered in Austria, where her dances have been regularly revived since her death 50 years ago.

Like many Viennese, Wiesenthal, born in 1885, grew up playing the waltz, but trained in classical ballet. She refined her technique at the Vienna Court Opera School, where she later insisted that the emphasis was not on art.

A solo waltz style was Wiesenthal’s answer to what she saw as the debilitating relationship between ballet and music. She saw the art form and the productions of opera as hopelessly committed to uniformity, with no room for the dancers to present themselves.

Wiesenthal developed her own technique, which she called spherical dance, which concentrated on a different axis than ballet. Twists and extensions were placed on a horizontal line of the body, and her arms, torso, and legs would extend across the room at the same time. With bent knees, she manipulated the curve of her curves and was able to lean into sickle-shaped back bends. She was not tied to a partner and was able to gracefully sweep her arms to plunge them into a balance that defies balance.

The spinning was a critical movement in their dances, just like in the waltz. And while their contemporaries Duncan and St. Denis also spun more freely and openly than ballet, for the most part they remained vertical. Wiesenthal’s torso was not pinned in a stacked position over her hips so she could create more exaggerated angles.

Wiesenthal was also inspired by nature. Aside from smaller theaters, she often performed outdoors to remove the barrier between the audience and the stage, and created dances that reflected the elements and their surroundings.

The cultural historian Alys X. George, author of “The Naked Truth: Viennese Modernism and the Body” (2020), said in an interview that the artistic avant-garde in Vienna, who adored Duncan and St. Denis, was enthusiastic about the local Wiesenthal, when she introduced her contemporary style.

“That was just electrifying for the city because Wiesenthal really embraced this Austrian dance form, the waltz, and breathed a new life into it,” she said. “She freed it from the balls, she took it outside, she also connected it to nature, but kept the connections to music that so invigorated Viennese culture.”

The Viennese have loved the waltz for centuries. It began as a wild, popular country dance in parts of Germany and Austria in the 18th century and quickly spread through the social classes and became known among the upper classes and the aristocracy as an elegant form of entertainment. In Vienna, the waltz – the city’s version is characterized by the three-stage structure of the music, which was danced at high speed – supplanted the tight minuet in the early 19th century, and composers such as Johann Strauss senior and Joseph Lanner made it famous worldwide.

In the waltz Wiesenthal found what, in her opinion, ballet had become cold – musicality. “Nobody knew anything about the merging of music and movement,” she said in a lecture from 1910. “My desire for a different dance, for a truer dance became stronger and clearer and at the same time I learned how not to do ballet dances should do. “

Despite her disenchantment with ballet, she began her professional career at the Vienna Court Opera. There she danced for several years and left after a controversial casting decision, which put her at the center of a fight between the then opera director Gustav Mahler and the ballet master Josef Hassreiter. Mahler gave Wiesenthal – a member of the Corps de Ballet – a solo in “La Muette de Portici”, which made Hassreiter angry and directly violated his wishes.

Just a few months after the premiere of “La Muette”, Wiesenthal left the company and, as she put it, a life in which one “stayed in step and didn’t get out of line”.

At the beginning of 1908 Wiesenthal and her sisters Elsa and Berta made their debut in the Cabaret Fledermaus with original choreography. They danced and played solos together, but it was Wiesenthal’s “Donauwalzer” solo to Strauss’s “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” that was the highlight of the program. (When she became famous, street musicians sang her along with Strauss’ waltzes, the dancer La Meri said decades later.)

The Wiesenthal sisters danced in Vienna and Berlin and performed in the London Hippodrome in 1909. They were a hit in London, where The Dancing Times later wrote that the sisters “weren’t mere actresses; They were poems. “When Wiesenthal came to the US alone for the first time in 1912 and brought her program to winter theater, she called The New York Review, a weekly theater newspaper,“ the high priestess of joy and ecstasy ”.

Wiesenthal’s energetic approach to dance inspired many collaborations with Vienna’s leading artists. In 1910, the playwright and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal became a close creative partner with her growing reputation as a soloist. She starred in his pantomimes and silent films, distilling complex narratives through their emotional essence rather than literal gestures.

She was also seen in the world premiere of Richard Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s “Ariadne Auf Naxos” (1912) in a self-choreographed role and was commissioned to perform Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in the spring of 1913, the same month that the curtain for “The Ritus des Spring. “Although it never came about, said Andrea Amort, founder and director of the dance archive at the Music and Art University of the City of Vienna, it should be a new production, with a libretto by Hofmannsthal and danced by Nijinsky, Wiesenthal and Ida Rubinstein.

Throughout her career, critics and audiences admired her dance for its gentleness, and critics consistently noted her charm and femininity in her reviews. But Wiesenthal experimented with the extremes of the expressive potential of the waltz.

She also explored a deeper connection between the dancer and the audience. “It seems to be her secret that her dancers do not wallow with each other, but alone, so that the audience feels like partners,” said dance author George Jackson in the program notes for George Balanchine’s “Vienna Waltzes”. (1977). (Balanchine’s work also features a solo waltz in its final section, moving across the stage, luring the audience with it.) Wiesenthal, wrote Mr. Jackson, “could take the closed waltz and open it for inspection without destroying beings . “

Her choreography is full of subtle nuances, and her subtleties delighted audiences when she performed in intimate theaters. However, their dances lose some of their vigor when performed on a large opera stage. Jolantha Seyfried, a former first soloist of the Vienna State Opera Ballet, who performed three Wiesenthal works in the 1980s and 1990s, remembered rehearsing her “Death and the Maiden”.

“In addition to these large swings and floating movements, she has very small, very sensitive movements,” said Ms. Seyfried in a video interview and demonstrated an energy that flows through her own hand. “Sometimes she only works with her fingers, she lets her fingers breathe.”

Ms. Seyfried is currently working with Ms. Amort (both are professors in the dance department of the Music and Art University) to revive a wider exploration of her technique, not just her repertoire. The Ballet Academy of the Vienna State Opera is now also considering including its technique and choreography in its curriculum.

Wiesenthal’s articulation of the music and her choice of composers – Strauss (Johann, Josef and Richard), Schubert, Beethoven, Chopin – were inextricably linked with the waltz. But it was a completely new vision.

When she returned to America on her second tour in 1933 with the dancer from the Vienna State Opera Willy Franzl, the audience had turned to various forms of expressive modern dance and her style was received as pure nostalgia. The New York Times dance critic, John Martin, wrote: “Your dance was exhilarating in its day, make no mistake. When seen at a later date in relation to its time, it will dance intoxicatingly again. “

Maybe now is that future time. It is a year in which a bold solo waltz that is not tied to any major theater conventions can not only be refreshing, but also exhilarating again.