RISING STARS AT BALLET CAMP: The Miami City Ballet Summer Intensive is a program that takes about 200 of the best dancers from around the world for a mixture of discipline, hard work and comradery. The eager dancers are training five days a week this summer at the Miami Beach facility.
Despite having been without an executive director for a year and a half, Florida Dance Festival is preparing to leap onto local stages and dance studios again this year, with two new commissioned pieces and performances by students and faculty.
Give a bunch of ballet dancers a vacation, and what do they do? Keep dancing. For the 30-some dancers from Miami City Ballet performing this weekend in Our Show, the annual dancer-produced and curated fundraiser-slash-homegrown event, it's an opportunity to strut some of the stuff they don't get to show off during the ballet's regular season.
Barbara Paula looks nothing like a classical ballerina, but when she speaks of dancing on the stage, her face glows with confidence.
Another leading Cuban dancer has defected to the United States and will perform in South Florida next weekend, the fourth Cuban ballet performer to come to the United States in as many months.
Normally, a bullet penetrates its target in a matter of seconds, but the trajectory of the shots that ended the life of Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca have traveled for decades.
Love is dark and overwhelming in Twyla Tharp's Nightspot, less emotional force than sheer force of nature. And while there's definitely some nightclub moments in the famed choreographer's new ballet, which Miami City Ballet premiered Friday night at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, it's as much about the dark place inside as any place to hit the dance floor and the opposite sex.
Legendary choreographer Twyla Tharp has plenty to do on a recent afternoon: costumes to adjust, rehearsals to run for the much anticipated world premiere of her latest creation, Nightspot. But as soon as a photo shoot of the rehearsal gets going, she can't help it. Give Tharp an opportunity to play, and she will.
The most stunning thing about the stunning Les écailles de la mémoire (The scales of memory), the dance theater piece performed by the Urban Bush Women and Compagnie Jant-Bi on Saturday night, was its transcendence. Memory starts from an almost unbearably painful inspiration, the experience of slavery, but it finishes, miraculously, with celebration. Literally embodied in these two companies from the United States and Senegal, Memory is a tribute to people's ability to keep...
The Miami Light Project's Here & Now Festival, now in its 10th year, provides a quick glimpse at what's bubbling up in Miami's theatrical underground. That's sexual and pop culture ambivalence, aerial antics, and domestic rebellion, to judge from the four works performed Friday night at the Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.
The Sleeping Beauty can be the grandest of classical ballets, with a sweeping formal beauty that can make even a simplistic fairy tale of goodness and true love conquering evil meaningful to grown-ups. Not so with American Ballet Theater's production of Marius Petipa's 1890 classic, which opened a five-performance run on Thursday night at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in a Beauty as bright as a Disney cartoon and with about as much depth.
The first journeys that Africans made to America were so horrific that we're loathe to remember them. That is partly why two modern dance companies, Urban Bush Women, an African-American female troupe from Brooklyn, and Compagnie Jant-Bi, a male group from Senegal, chose to delve into that history.
Cuba's loss of three ballet dancers is the world's gain -- and, at least for this past weekend, Miami's. Taras Domitro, Miguel Angel Blanco and Hayna Gutierrez, the young principal dancers who defected from the National Ballet of Cuba in December, dazzled cheering audiences at the Cuban Classical Ballet's performances of Swan Lake at the Fillmore Miami Beach on Saturday and Sunday. It wasn't political enthusiasm, but spectacular dancing.
For hard-core flamenco aficionados, dancing is at the bottom of the flamenco hierarchy, following singing and guitar-playing in power and expressiveness. But you couldn't call Mujeres, the celebration of flamenco dancing in Saturday's third and final performance of Flamenco Festival Miami, anything but top of the line.
When flamenco dancer Belén Maya is having a good night, when she is feeling the singer, feeling the music and, above all, feeling the moment, it takes her beyond her lifetime of training and everything she knows her superbly accomplished body can do.
