This year’s Philadelphia Fringe Festival runs August 31-September 15, 2007. Click here to see how to present your own work–it’s a fabulous scene for artists of all stripes.

Miki Liszt Dance Company announces its Winter/Spring Session classes. All classes are open to the public and are available through purchasing a class card or on a drop-in basis.

The classes are as follows:
Tuesdays 6-7:30 Int/Adv Modern taught by Miki Liszt
Thursdays 6-7:30 Int/Adv Modern taught by Miki Liszt Dance Company (January is being taught by Keira Hart)
Fridays (except the first friday of the month) 5:30-7pm (Round Robin instructors)
Saturdays 11:30-12:30 Somatic Potpourri: February 10 - Pilates; February 17 - Ashtanga
Price: drop-in $10/class class card $96 for 12 classes ($8/class)

For more information contact Rachael L. Shaw at rachaellshaw at yahoo dot com or visit www.mikilisztdance.org.

Come join our wonderful warm community for a weekend of dancing in Richmond, VA. We are excited to have Alicia Grayson to teach our morning classes and lead our afternoon warm-up into jamming. The weekend will start with a potluck at Page Ghaphery’s home followed by a jam at VCU Dance Center (10 N. Brunswick St.). Saturday and Sunday jams and classes will also be held at the VCU Dance Center. There will be time for playing in the James river, naps, walks, conversations and showers Saturday afternoon before we gather for a community dinner and a barefoot boogie, “Wigged-Out”– bring wigs for sharing. The Richmond community is looking forward to welcoming all of you to our jam this year.
Registration is $75 ($85 after April 23rd). To register, send a check payable to Patty Pickering, along with the information below to:
Patty Pickering, 10611 Wrens Nest Ct. Richmond, Va. 23235.
Include: Name, Address, City, State, Zip, Telephone, E-mail.
Also include answers to the following: When do you plan to arrive? Do you need a place to stay? If yes, do you have pet allergies or other special needs?
CONTACT: Patty Pickering EMAIL: plpickering@mindspring.com

Richmond Ballet Studio Theatre
3 October 2006

The Richmond Ballet’s Studio Series continually evolves, as the company experiments with the juxtaposition of formal with informal, new works with classics. This season’s Studio I offered works by two classic 20th century choreographers—George Balanchine and Agnes de Mille—and a world premiere by Susan Shields.

The curtain opens on Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante with four couples already in motion, and this corps of eight carried off their roles in sprightly fashion with lively, satisfying energy. The success of much of Balanchine’s work depends not only on superlative technique, speed and musicality, but, as critic Deborah Jowitt has discussed in Time and the Dancing Image, on the dancers’ willingness to act as “angelic messengers who reveal but do not comment,” to strip themselves of mannerism, allowing for the pure expression of musical and choreographic relationships. This, Valerie Tellmann and Igor Antonov in the lead roles did not accomplish, varnishing their dancing with a layer of sentiment that felt insincere and distracting.

By contrast, two duets created for the company in 1981 by Agnes de Mille, set to music by Schubert, felt sweetly flirtatious and surprisingly intimate. In Songs in Green Places, Thomas Garrett gently rocked Anne Sidney Davenport on his knees or lifted beneath her arms and draped her softly along. In her company debut, Cecile Tuzii danced with Philip Skaggs in You Are My Peace, demonstrating a fully-embodied physicality with lovely lines and a clear shaping of the space around her.

In Dark Hugs Me Hard, choreographer Susan Shields began to explore the depth of her grief in the aftermath of her husband’s death. A video introduction preceded this work, describing its origin in her personal experience; I have mixed feelings about knowing the back story before seeing work. An audience has greater breadth of interpretation when they can take a piece at face value. Dim, green-tinted lighting (by MK Stewart) and a set of three panels in a row upstage on which images of rain on glass were projected, invoked a somber mood. Ten dancers in nude costumes moved slowly through the space, the men dragging the women, sometimes letting them fall. Curved upper backs and lifts of nearly lifeless bodies indicated despair. The work was filled with compelling imagery, but broke off only partly realized; neither the dancers nor Shields herself appeared to have yet dug deeply enough into the jagged rawness death brings to the survivor.–L.M.