As always, we want to share with you our favorite dance moments from around the Internet (and IRL). If you’re like us, once you start looking, you see incredible examples of dance-centric storytelling everywhere. So this sampling is just a tiny tip of the iceberg of great work we’re following, from the undiscovered to the hyped and from the fine art world to the commercial realm. If you have a creative project around movement and you want to better understand how dance can be leveraged to tell a great story, we’d love to hear about it. In the meantime, we hope you have a relaxing holiday weekend and can take a moment enjoy one, two or all of these inspiring selects.
CANDICE’S SELECTS
- This short documentary by The Palette Group. Lauri Stallings is the first choreographer as artist in residence at a major art museum in the Deep South, introducing an immersive and durational suite of live art, sculpture, video, drawings, and neon. The film captures the ephemeral and empathetic essence of her art and tells her visionary and change-making story.
- Follow the films. And tv shows. So many new projects in the works, from blockbuster to indie, are showcasing the emotional power of a dance story: a bio pic of Alvin Ailey from Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, Beale Street), a new West Side Story by Steven Spielberg with choreography from NYCB’s Justin Peck, Netflix’s ballet drama Tiny Pretty Things, BBC Films’ Mari (featuring one of our fave choreographers, Bobbi Jene Smith, in a fictional role not too unlike her own), and as if any of us needed another guilty pleasure…a documentary on dance king Patrick Swayze. How can commercials ride this powerful wave of dance stories?
- Choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili is one of T Magazine’s “15 New Creatives.” We have been following and writing about the art of the multi-hyphenate dance artist since 2015, so we are pretty stoked to see the mainstream media catch on.
LARA’S SELECTS
- Paul Thomas Anderson’s dystopian one-reeler “Anima,” set to Thom Yorke’s latest music and choreographed by Damien Jalet. If you haven’t yet queued up this 12-minute, physical theater short starring Yorke on Netflix, I suggest dropping everything and watching now. The movement and the music are so ingrained in the world of the film that they become part of its fabric.
“[Thom Yorke] came to me and said, ‘Listen, I have this new album and I have some ideas: I see workers, I see people, their bodies don’t work anymore, and their bodies are being pushed by this invisible force. I see a collective. Something that rises.’”
—Damien Jalet
- Dance in the Ace Hotel lobby. New York City dancer Georgia Usborne (of Gallim Dance) spent the summer curating and performing in a series of live dance pop-ups under her multidisciplinary performance and residency platform, Create:ART.
- ‘Furor.’ A friend lent me her copy of the latest iteration of a Dance Mag, which focuses on how dance helps channel anger, rage, or excitement. Reading the stories helped me reframe my own connection to movements — in particular, headbanging — and actually process feelings differently.
AND: MOVES WE’VE BEEN MAKING THIS SUMMER
- Candice: performing durationally in Supple Means of Connection at the High Museum in Atlanta, Georgia
- Lara: choreographing and performing in a live activation of artist Elizabeth Turk’s Tipping Point installation at the Catalina Museum in Avalon, California
- Candice and Lara: supporting choreographer Allegra Searle-LeBel and film director Cole Rise as they ventured into zero gravity for the first time together in preparation for the first fine art dance film in that space
- Candice: assisting The Palette Group on a blk.water bid
- Lara: performing at DTLA’s REDCAT in The Muses by Katherine Helen Fisher and Andrew Ondrejcak and concluding her 2019 residency at The Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton, California
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