dance writer

A contemporary ballet titled “Radio and Juliet”, as in the Edward Clug choreography for Slovenia’s Ballet Maribor, conjures images of the theatrical Shakespeare classic love story. Clug’s 40-minute dance piece indeed alludes to a theatrical story by way of a large-scale, slow-moving black and white video projection (uncredited in the program). Footage of huge close-ups of a solitary woman in an empty apartment interspersed with brief interludes of men performing flashy edgy gestures, sets up an intriguing story, and evokes questions, building hope that the upcoming dance might answer them. Who is this isolated woman? Juliet? Where is she? Why is she alone? What is her relationship to these men? The music of Radiohead begins to pulse and the live company of dancers enter one by one introducing themselves with a simple walk downstage. The piece then erupts into full-on energetic dance, exquisitely performed with great precision by seven strong dancers-six men and one woman. C

When advertising suggests that a dance concert by two university professors-with excellent support and resources-will be of epic proportions, the expectations are high. In this case, professors Robin Becker of Hofstra University and Jin-Wen Yu of the University of Wisconsin-Madison created dances based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book "They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America" by David Maraniss. These dances were apparently derived from and inspired by the book's topics of the 1967 bombing of Sterling Hall at UW and the Vietnam war--hefty subject matter, which would have been better served in the hands of master choreographers. In this case, a way-too-long performance (clocking in at 2 hours and 30 minutes) came nowhere near expected hype, and to use the word of the audience member next to me, was "offensive". Becker's piece "Into Sunlight", suffered from dim tiring lighting, designed by Burke Wilmore, and continuous s