modern dance – Page 3

10 Questions With…Allan Greene

June 5, 2012 by 4dancers

Today on 10 Questions With… we have Allan Greene, a pianist that works in the dance world…

We would also like to welcome Allan to our contributing writer staff here at 4dancers. He’ll be writing a new monthly column appropriately titled, “Music Notes”…

1. How did you get started in music?

I started composing on my own when I was eight years old after I tired of copying songs from our third grade songbooks. The next year I began studying the cello at my elementary school, and the next year I began studying piano with the wife of one of my father’s electronic engineer colleagues. Things moved rapidly from there.

The cantor at my family’s synagogue recommended me to a Viennese choir-master who passed me on to an eccentric Juilliard-trained pianist. The intensity of the Juilliard training was too much for me and conflicted with Boy Scouts and after-school basketball. I moved on to a retired violinist / pianist who devoted his Saturdays to me, and presented me in recital several months before my 16^th birthday.

All the while I was composing on my own. At the age of twelve I was composing suites of atonal works, for various chamber music combinations as well as solo piano. My high school choir performed a setting I created of a poem by James Joyce. Stylistically, I was heading out the trajectory blazed by Charles Ives, inventing what I called “stream-of-consciousness music” analogous to Joyce’s literary technique: I created a musical narrative out of musical objets trouvés, using juxtaposition of styles and recognizable snippets to shape the drama. A generation later, due to the invention of sampling synthesizers, personal computers and audio production software, some of my ideas were independently showing up as common compositional tools in film and television scores.

2. What brought you into the dance world?

Accompanying ballet and modern dance classes was a work-study contract gig available at Carleton College (Northfield, Minnesota) in my freshman year. After a term washing dishes at one of the college’s cafeterias, it was a god-send. I found it easy, delightful to watch and participate in, and, importantly, made being a musician both quotidian and artistic. I’ve never liked having the spotlight trained on me, so this allowed me to participate and observe simultaneously. Accompanying dance became a laboratory for me to study the effect on collaborating artists of all kinds of music and all sorts of harmonies, melodies, rhythms and textures. It still is.

3. Where has your career taken you in terms of playing for dancers? [Read more…]

Adult Ballet Student: Jennifer Pendleton

March 22, 2012 by 4dancers

We’d like to welcome our next adult ballet student…Jennifer Pendleton….

1. How did you first get involved with ballet and what attracted you to it as an adult?

I actually began when I was fairly young, at 6, and danced through high school with a local ballet company. I didn’t have the right combination of talent and discipline to seriously consider pursuing a career, but despite myself took classes and performed regularly through college until, ironically, I moved to New York, was working in (modern) dance administration, and had a hard time reconciling going to ballet class when I wasn’t trying to get onstage. I gradually stopped going to classes until, about 10 years later and after living overseas and growing completely detached from any performing arts community, I moved to DC, and a friend convinced me to try a class here. It turns out this is a great area for adults, working at any level, to find a nice combination of training and community.

2. How many classes are you currently taking per week?

4-6

3. What do you see as your biggest challenge as an adult ballet student?

Making peace with where I am at my age and after so much time off (my yoga practice has helped a lot), and that fear – even in my 30s – about my joints and injuries that I didn’t have as a younger dancer. Some things I knew I wouldn’t get back, like the ‘hang time’ in my jumps. Others surprised me: even with open hips, my ‘fifth’ position looks more and more like third. And spotting is a chore for me now – I couldn’t seem to relearn it. For my first couple of months back in class, I was also surprised by how much I had to think about the combinations, although that quickly passed and I am back to focusing on simply dancing and technique.

4. What brings you the greatest joy as an adult ballet student?

I am in class simply for the joy of dancing and the challenge, and accomplishing whatever I can from one day to the next. I have had so many wonderful opportunities in my career and life in general, but simply reconnecting with something with that had always been such a big part of me, to the point I almost didn’t even realize it, has been such a pleasure. And for all the frustrations of an aging body, I am constantly amazed by what I can still do – and sometimes even better with the wisdom of experience and a different sense of discipline.

5. Do you have any advice for other adult ballet students?

Whether you have had technical training in your youth or not, try to go regularly enough that you can make class about more than just learning the combinations. If you have made a choice to be in class, don’t be afraid – this is such a supportive community, so just do your best and dance!

Success and Housewives: Making Modern Dance Make Sense

February 8, 2012 by 4dancers

by Lauren Warnecke

GrindCalwm-3953 — Photo by Kelly Rose of Savage Rose Photography

Perhaps one of the biggest barriers that “normal people” express about going to see modern dance is that they don’t understand it. At nearly every post-show talk-back I’ve ever attended there are at least one or two people who start their comment with, “Now, I don’t know anything about modern dance, but…..” yada yada, you fill in the blank. The standard issue response that I tend to hear is “you don’t have to understand it,” or “whatever you FEEL it’s about, IS what it’s about.”

That is completely true, and something I’ve said myself on numerous occasions. But over the past few months I’ve been formulating a theory that it’s not a particularly useful response. In other words, I’m thinking that “come to this weird thing you don’t have to understand” isn’t as effective a tagline as we’d like to think it is to getting butts in seats. After all, we are all human. We crave compelling stories and generally tend to try to apply meaning to things. Dance, however, often lives in a world of abstraction where the layers of meaning are imbedded in movements and gestures that don’t obviously reveal their stories. That’s what program notes are for…

The problem is, sometimes we (the choreographers) are so lost in the tangled web of ideas and abstraction that we too can’t exactly articulate what our pieces are about. When I gaze into a set of program notes and read that the dance I’m about to see is about a girl’s fiancé breaking their engagement, or satanic cults, or gender identity, I get a little overwhelmed.* Seeing a dance concert should be a relaxing and enjoyable experience that is accessible to everyone, and satanic cults are something I don’t often feel like dealing with on a Friday night. It’s not that these topics aren’t important and can’t or shouldn’t be explored through dance; it’s just that maybe you can find another way to express your idea by pairing it with something a little easier to swallow. Either way, heavy topics often become so abstracted by the time they reach the stage that you might as well say that the piece is about puppies, because the untrained eye won’t really see the difference anyway. No matter the subject, we come up with quips and phrases for press releases and program notes that say sort of what we think our piece is about, but most program notes could really just say “this piece is about whatever you feel it’s about and you don’t have to understand it” (read: “I’m not so sure what it’s about either…”). [Read more…]

One Dancer’s Journey…

November 14, 2011 by 4dancers

Today I’d like to welcome Todd Fox as our latest contributor to 4dancers. Todd originally was going to complete the interview I sent for “10 Questions With…” the feature I typically use to highlight dancers and dance-related professionals on this site.

Time passed and he found himself answering the questions in depth, and after we talked a bit, we decided we would break them down into monthly posts, so that readers could get a closer look at his journey through the dance world. Today is his first post…answering question 1…stay tuned next month for more! -Catherine

1. How did you become involved in dance?

I was born in Miami Florida and from a very early age my mom exposed me to dance. She taught ballet for a magnet arts school in Miami called PAVAC, Performing and Visual Arts Center, and used to drag me around to all the classes she taught.

As I got old enough she made me learn ballet by taking one of her classes each week with her other students. At that age I wasn’t at all interested in studying ballet, I thought it was boring and I hated wearing tights. All I ever wanted to do was go ride my bike with friends or play video games but my mother was insistent, VERY insistent. She eventually presented me with an effective ultimatum, take one ballet class per week or I wouldn’t receive my weekly allowance. So, I studied ballet like this on and off for most of my young life, I went through the motions but never really took a serious interest, it was all just to appease my mom and of course get my allowance.

When I was 13 my family moved to New Jersey and in Somerset County where I attended public school there was a Vocational and Technical School (vo-tech) which had a performing arts program offering dance. There were lots of girls in the Vo-Tech dance program from mine and several neighboring schools with no guys at all. At that age the thought of spending my day dancing around with lots of girls and being the only guy had amazing appeal and much to my mom’s complete jaw dropping shock and surprise I begged for her to let me enroll. [Read more…]

No Audience Left Behind

August 17, 2011 by 4dancers

Recently 4dancers Contributor Lizzie Leopold said something that made me think….she talked about including program notes for the audience in effort to help them understand more about what was going on through the dance performance.

Brilliant. I wish more people would do this.

Back when I was growing up, ballet had this air of mystery surrounding it. It was almost as if the audience shouldn’t be allowed up close and personal. As if the magic would somehow be lost. I’m not the first person to point this out–but it was definitely a different atmosphere, and a very closed one. Still, it was set against a backdrop of story ballets, making it comfortable for the audience in terms of watching the dance performances and understanding the story.

These days, with Modern dance and other Contemporary dance performances, it is easy to leave the audience in the dark–but is it necessary–or even wise to do so? [Read more…]

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