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DVD Review: The Magic of the Mat: Teaching Little Ballerinas on the Alphamat Volume 1

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Screen Shot 2014-02-27 at 6.28.58 PMby Emily Kate Long

This hour-long instructional DVD is a teaching tool from Magical Kingdom of Dance for use in preschool and pre-ballet classes. Developed by Mary Alpha Johnson over the course of 67 years of teaching, and continued by her daughter Tonie Johnson Bense, the curriculum in this DVD is designed to inspire young dancers with the use of characters, poems, and songs. There are games for learning right from left, using directions in personal and general space, and for basic ballet and locomotor steps. All the French ballet terms used are paired with a character to make memorization fun and meaningful: Saute the Bunny, Port de Bras the Octopus, and Bouree the Bumblebee are just a few friends featured on the DVD.

In The Magic of the Mat, Johnson Bense leads a group of sweet three- to six-year-olds through their paces on an illustrated 52” square mat. While the DVD and mat are designed to be used together, the exercises Bense teaches her young dancers could be easily adapted to any pre-ballet class setting. They would make an especially good starting point for someone new to teaching little ones. From putting on diamonds out of a jewelry box to buzzing around an imaginary front yard with bourees, The Magic of the Mat contains great strategies for a fun, imaginative, disciplined, and joyful pre-ballet classroom. The DVD and many other teaching tools, along with more information about the curriculum, can be found online at MagicalKingdomOfDance.com

DVD Review: TuTu Much!

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220px-TUTUMuchPosterby Emily Kate Long

TuTu Much! Follows nine female ballet students through the audition process for Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet School. These girls are pushed to their physical and emotional limits over the course of the four-week summer school, which serves as an audition for the RWBS year-round professional division. They compete with friends, classmates, and roommates, but most intensely with themselves. They’ve taken to heart the message that dance is hard work and not for the faint of spirit, the indifferent, or the undisciplined. They’re regular kids with big, serious ambitions, and they handle themselves with poise where there are careers are concerned. To balance the solemnity of the studio, there’s plenty of levity in endearing shots of the girls video chatting with family, mock-fighting with water sprayers, and raiding the school vending machines.

This film is an honest look into one school’s selection process, and the nine young subjects, their teachers, and their families are all very candid about the ups and downs of professional ballet training. The film hit selected movie theaters across Canada in 2010, giving the general public a peek into this foreign, mostly inaccessible world. Producers Vonnie Von Helmolt and Merit Jensen Carr and Director Elise Swerhone deserve kudos for presenting to the public a much more realistic look at professional dance training—what it actually takes to “make it”—than any American TV program ever has.

TuTu Much! made me root for all parties involved. I wanted these young women to succeed. I felt for their parents facing tough financial and family decisions. I sympathized with the teachers’ demands that every student bring her full effort into the work. Though most appealing to a dance audience, the film is important in a broader sense because it presents a set of highly driven young people, something that seems to be increasingly rare. It’s mostly straight talk about the sometimes harsh realities of the dance world, with just enough sweetness and charm to be satisfying.

Ashton Celebration: The Royal Ballet Dances Frederick Ashton

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by Emily Kate Long

dvd_ashtonAshton Celebration: The Royal Ballet Dances Frederick Ashton is true to its title, offering both onstage and offstage tributes to Frederick Ashton, one of the twentieth century’s choreographic giants and architect of the English style. Through six ballets and fifteen minutes of interview footage, we get a look at the particularities and peculiarities of Ashton, and the rigor undergone to preserve the works. The ballets represent a full range of flavors in Ashton’s work, from the steamy, serpentine Monotones I to the heartbreakingly romantic Marguerite and Armand. The DVD was filmed live at the Royal Opera House in February 2013.

One of the special features on the DVD is a series of interview clips on the subject of the Frederic Ashton Foundation, whose aim is to perpetuate the legacy and work of the choreographer. Among comments from stagers and dancers about the preservation of the choreographer’s intent and style, Anthony Dowell makes a very important point: in all of this, the aim is not to “make museum pieces,” but to keep the works alive and in good custody so they remain relevant. Rojo adds the observation that the sheer difficulty of the choreography keeps the ballets challenging, even as dancers become more and more technically skilled.

The comparison is often drawn between Ashton and George Balanchine, but it’s especially striking in La Valse, the first ballet on the program, because Balanchine used the same Ravel score for a work of his own. Frederick Ashton did for British ballet what Balanchine did in the US: He defined a style, fiendishly athletic but with a different emphasis, more subtle but no less expressive. Ashton’s La Valse is most interesting for the complexities of epaulement within a standard choreographic composition. The whole affair sumptuously dark, a rich painting of Ravel’s unnerving score. It all dissolves into giddy, brassy chaos as the curtain descends on a corps de ballet of dozens and three principal couples.

Next are two very different pas de deux, the Meditation de Thais, set to Massenet, and Voices of Spring, set to Strauss. The first is aching and exotic, a la La Bayadere; the second is a playful showpiece more along the lines of Spring Waters. I don’t think this particular Voices of Spring is the most satisfying example available on video; Yuhui Choe and Alexander Campbell perform with great competence but little dimension. [Read more…]

A Program To Remember (Pacific Northwest Ballet)

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Image courtesy of PNB
Image courtesy of PNB

by Gigi Berardi

Stunning, breathtakingly beautiful, and unparalleled in programing and performance, PNB’s November program, Kylian + Pite, was one not to be missed. It is easily the most memorable (non-full-length ballet) program in the almost 20 years that I have been viewing and reviewing the company.

Huge kudos to Peter Boal, ballet masters all, and the generous supporters that made the PNB premieres possible – Forgotten Land (Kylian) and Emergence (Pite). Both ballets were utterly unforgettable, not to mention the gorgeous music of the PNB Orchestra.

In terms of performance, here are just a few highlights –

Foster and Mullin as the insect creatures emerging from the depths in Crystal Pite’s Emergence

  • Orza, Porretta, Bold, Gaines, and Bartee, as well as every single principal female — in anything
  • Samuelson breaking out and through in everything
  • Actually, all the petite mort dancers, who lived and breathed the ballet’s roles
  • In Sechs Tänze, the Imler, Merchant, Foster, Kitchens crew – mesmerizing
  • Forgotten Land – every single dancer made that piece come alive – haunting with a capital “H,” the dancers were aided in their other-worldliness by the literal and exquisite East Anglia backdrop
  • Week 2, virtually all the corps dancers (there were a few that needed a bit more confidence, if not rehearsal) in first-time roles – Bravo, Brava, Bravi, Brave!!!!!

This program, quite simply, will live in PNB’s history as one of its finest. Of course, there’s always 2014-2015.

Gigi Berardi
Gigi Berardi

Gigi Berardi holds a MA in dance from UCLA. Her academic background and performing experience allow her to combine her interests in the natural and social sciences with her passion for dance, as both critic and writer. Over 150 articles and reviews by Ms. Berardi have appeared in Dance Magazine, Dance International, the Los Angeles Times, the Anchorage Daily News, The Olympian, The Bellingham Herald, and scientific journals such as BioScience, Human Organization, and Ethics, Place, and Environment. Her total work numbers over 400 print and media pieces.

Her public radio features (for KSKA, Anchorage) have been recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists.  She has served on the Board of Directors of the Dance Critics Association, and is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, as well as Book Review editor for The Journal of Dance Medicine & Science.  A professor at Western Washington University, she received the university’s Diversity Achievement Award in 2004.  Her fifth book, Finding Balance: Fitness and Training for a Lifetime in Dance, is in its second printing. Her current book project is titled A Cultivated Life.

Email: Gigi.Berardi@wwu.ed<mailto:Gigi.Berardi@wwu.edu>u

Website: http://myweb.facstaff.wwu.edu/~gberardi and http://www.gigiberardi.com/

Blogs: http://blog.gigiberardi.com/ and http://resilientfarmsnourishingfoods.blogspot.com/

Contemporary Dance Warmup For Intermediate/Advanced Dancers With Bruno Collinet

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by Emily Kate Long

“Organic” is the word Bruno Collinet uses most to describe his movement philosophy in this 60-minute Contemporary Dance Warmup (by Tezoro LIVE Productions). That word has become so widely used in so many different contexts that it carries little descriptive power, but in this case one thing “organic” certainly means it that the movement feels good. Technique is not the emphasis here, rather, a sense of listening to the body while directing its energy. The movement is expansive and invigorating, challenging yet therapeutic. Bruno Collinet’s teaching manner is warm and welcoming, dynamic and energetic as he guides the viewer through five sections of elastic, visceral movement.

1069Each section is demonstrated in the studio by Collinet and two assistant dancers, and then shown with music in a class. The dancers on the video are arranged in different facings, making the movement sequences easy to learn.

Section I is floor work—a series of contractions, swings, rolls, and stretches “to put the body in a good mood,” as Collinet puts it. This is followed in the class by shoulder stretches, balance, and spotting work. In turning the head, Collinet emphasizes taking the eyes (“the look”) first, then following through with the head, something that often gets overlooked in many exercises for spotting or head isolation. I was happy to see it addressed here.

Section II focuses on the hips, backs of legs, and outsides of legs in a sequence of standing weight transfers, loose developpes, a fall, and a little more floor work. In section III, plies in first, second, and fourth position are deliciously tangled up with suspensions, cambres, and balances on two feet and one foot. Sections IV and V are a set of leg swings front and back in attitude. Section V emphasizes equilibrium with more suspensions and balances punctuating each repetition of the leg swing set.

This warmup is a comfortable and stimulating full-body workout. It was easy enough to follow and left me feeling powerful, coordinated, and in touch with my limbs and the ground. Taken at a slower pace or performed in reverse order, it could also make a good cool-down for looseness and relaxation after dancing.

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