Audacity of Dance
If there’s anybody who embodies ‘rizz’—charisma in today’s coolspeak—it’s dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Benjamin Millepied.
PlusWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
BODYTRAFFIC, the ten-year-old Los Angeles-based dance troupe, is touring nationally and made a stop at Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts recently. The show featured two choreographers with Philadelphia connections. Sidra Bell, who teaches at the University of the Arts, and BalletX co-founder and Pennsylvania Ballet resident choreographer, Matthew Neenan. BODYTRAFFIC returns to Philadelphia’s Annenberg Center in April with a slightly different program that includes the Philadelphia premiere of Neenan’s “A Million Voices.”
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BODYTRAFFIC in “o2Joy” by Richard Siegal. Photograph by Christopher Duggan
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If there’s anybody who embodies ‘rizz’—charisma in today’s coolspeak—it’s dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Benjamin Millepied.
PlusOne might easily mistake the prevailing mood as light-hearted, heading into intermission after two premieres by Brenda Way and Kimi Okada for ODC/Dance’s annual Dance Downtown season. Maybe this is just what we need to counter world events, you may think. But there is much more to consider beneath the high production values of this beautifully wrought program. Okada, for instance, folds a dark message into her cartoon inspired “Inkwell.” And KT Nelson’s “Dead Reckoning” from 2015 reminds us the outlook for climate change looms ever large.
PlusIt’s not every choreographer who works with economists, anthropologists, neuroscientists and cognitive scientists, not to mention collaborating with the Google Arts & Culture Lab and the Swedish pop group ABBA, but Wayne McGregor wouldn’t have it any other way.
PlusDance scholars have been remarking on the great Trisha Brown nearly from the day she first stepped into Robert Dunn’s class—the genesis of Judson Dance Theater—in the 1960s.
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