Delivering the strongest male performance of the evening, Kerry Jackson is trapped in a box of light. His passionate tirade in Consumed, an introduction to Kate Skarpetowska’s slightly scary world of driven conformists. Leaping from the stage he escapes an army of “suits” that urge surrender to their worker bee mentality. A Julliard alumni, Skarpetowska has danced for David Parsons, Lar Lubovitch, and newly named Alvin Ailey Artistic Director, Robert Battle. These influences are clear in athletic choreography, rich with human peculiarities.
Author Archives: Nichelle
Nichelle is a versatile digital marketing and communications professional. She has led and implemented social media, blog and email content strategy for two of Houston’s best-known institutions. She is also the founder of DanceAdvantage.net, the spot dance students, teachers and parents turn to for guidance in dance education.
LehrerDance Review: Buffalo Welcome to Roam in Houston Any Day
The performers are a septet with distinctive instrumentation. Like a good jazz composer, Lehrer knows how to flaunt each of his dancer’s unique qualities. Rehearsal director and a founding member of the young company, Marideth Wanat is versatile and can deliquesce into harmonies. However, with a spunk that sets her apart, she captivates when working alone, as in her emotive solo The Way Within. Chosen recently as one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch,” Wanat is the saxophone.
Tap is Back in Space City
Texas New Tap, a newly established production company whose purpose is to promote tap education and enthusiasm throughout the greater Houston area will launch Space City Tap Fest on February 26, 2010. Faculty will include astonishing young talent and 2009 Dance Magazine Award winner, Jason Samuels Smith, as well as emerging leaders Chloé and Maud Arnold.
Houston Met Dance Confronts the Ground with jhon r. stronks
Last spring, Houston Metropolitan Dance Company premiered jhon r. stronk’s Not Yet Soaring as the finale of their Mixing It Up concert. Its fresh and joyous movement language was a highlight on the program and the company encouraged stronks to develop the work further. The resulting collaboration, Still Confronting the Ground is a dance theater work that “finds them attending to the serious business of happiness in an evening of choreography and performance created in honor of growing up, and what it takes to get there.”
A Peek at Company Clare Dyson’s Voyeur
In Voyeur two performers, Dyson herself and Jonathan Sinatra, are within a large box. Its many holes offer viewing points, each one different and each revealing different aspects of the performers. Some have binoculars, others headphones through which the audience member will hear personal revelations from the dancers. Members of the audience may move in the space at will, allowing one to vary his/her proximity, to listen to things that are individually relevant, to choose how and to what degree he/she wants to engage with the work or the environment.
A Travesty! This Review 100% Recycled Material
The hour-long performance event consisted of mostly reworked, reused, reinvented, recovered, retrieved, and revisited material from the last 12 years of the Travesty Dance-Houston canon. Choreographer Karen Stokes and company were irREfutably enjoying themselves.
Nichelle Suzanne Strzepek 