Voices call and respond, as men and women move in a circle in a tresillo pulsing rhythm, keeping a beat with their hands and feet, and singing. They are moving together in an ecstatic ritual, a ring shout. Here and in the Caribbean, people brought from Africa and enslaved created […]
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Irene Rodríguez invokes Federico García Lorca in Cuban Flamenco
A woman walks down a mountain at sunrise, when the slopes are still dark around the rocks. Voices are singing to her: Roosters pick like axes and dig into the dawn … Amber copper, her body, with the scent of horses and shadow. Irene Rodríguez performs her own melding of […]
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Pilobolus dance company finds movement and connection in organic forms
They swing like saplings — roll and lift and orbit. Six dancers blend into three creatures, four-armed like dancing Shivas. They are wearing spare clothing the colors of their skin and moving in sunlight, to the sound of quiet strings and calling birds. Pilobolus has performed around the world for […]
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Brazilian piano meets hip hop in Ephrat Asherie’s Odeon
In the early 1900s in Brazil, Ernesto Nazareth composed music for solo piano. Ephrat Asherie remembers the first time she heard a classical melody jazzed up with samba. Her brother Ehud is a jazz pianist, and as he played she imagined the composer blending Brazilian with Chopin, a Baroque artist […]
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Ragamala performs Written on Water at Jacob’s Pillow
The game America knows as chutes and ladders goes back 1800 years. Painted snakes slither on historic boards, forming the slides, and the rungs reach up to flowering trees, plumed birds, suns and moons and rain shining like falling stars. The game descends from a second-century Indian tradition, and as Jacob’s […]
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Royal Danish Ballet returns to Jacob’s Pillow
In the summer of 1954, in the middle of his international dance festival, Ted Shawn was staying up nights and sending long-distance cables. Just before the curtain of his next performance, a key dancer had dropped out, and Shawn found himself reaching out to a woman and a company with a bare […]
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Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis transformed American dance with teachers around the world
On a warm summer night, a company of dancers comes to a park in Tokyo to see Koshiro Matsumoto, the foremost man dancer of Japan, performing kabuki. He performs to the music of stringed samisens and flute, drums and singers, transforming from one role to another — a young woman, a […]
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Camille A. Brown shares a sense of play at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival
On a summer night, children are playing in the dusk. Their families can tell the games from the words they hear — Red light, Green light. Marco Polo. Three girls are jumping rope on the sidewalk. Their friends are calling out rhymes like the clapping games they teach each other on […]
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Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival celebrates 85 years in Becket
It is July, 1932. An athletic, tanned and slender man with dark hair cut very short takes a break from his morning’s work. He stretches in the sun, unselfconsciously wearing little. He is laying a new floor to turn the barn into a dance studio. By the next summer, people in this […]
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Marsha Parilla choreographs healing with people who have been imprisoned
Marsha Parilla, artistic director and lead choreographer of the Boston company Danza Orgánica, will perform on the Inside / Out Stage at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Becket tomorrow, July 7. I spoke with her in the winter she she brought a performance to Pittsfield in partnership with Jacob’s Pillow. […]
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