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MORE STORIES

• THEATER REVIEW

  Pure poetry from Little Havana's Teatro 8

  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.

• ARSHT CENTER | BALLET

  Exploring love's dark side

  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.

• THE PERFORMING ARTS

  Two musical legends keep dancers on their toes

  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.

• PERFORMING ARTS

  Dancers break slave bonds, show triumph in `Memory'

  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...

• Review: Sex, antics, rebellion of underground theater

  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.

• Despite flash, this 'Sleeping Beauty' falls flat

  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.

• Dancing for memory: From out of Africa springs a powerful collaboration

  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.

• DANCE REVIEW

  'Swan Lake' superb with new Cuban trio

  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.

• Flamenco performance is outstanding

  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.

• Feel the beat: Passion, innovation keep the heart of flamenco alive

  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.

• DANCE

  Ballet to reprise 'Nine Sinatra Songs'

  A couple of days before Miami City Ballet's company premiere of Twyla Tharp's Nine Sinatra Songs in 2004, a surprise visitor showed up on the doorstep of the rehearsal studios in Miami Beach -- Tharp herself. Even Edward Villella, the company's founder and artistic director, had no idea she was coming.

• CUBAN DANCERS

  Dancing defectors made choice on the spot

  It was close to midnight in Hamilton, Ontario, and Magaly Suarez was in her hotel room packing her bags to go home to Miami when she was surprised by a knock at the hotel room door from her son, Taras Dimitro, and two of his fellow dancers in the National Ballet of Cuba. They wanted to defect. Would she help them?

• SOUTH FLORIDA

  3 Cuban dancers defect to perform in S. Florida

  Three leading dancers with the National Ballet of Cuba arrived in Fort Lauderdale late Monday after defecting following a performance in Canada last weekend.

• Three Cuban ballet dancers defect

  Three dancers identified as principals in the National Ballet of Cuba defected Sunday night, crossed into the United States at Buffalo, N.Y., and Monday night were headed to South Florida.

• DANCE

  Cali salsa troupe makes moves in Mouseland

  For the second time in two years, Whitman Angulo was getting ready to trade his cinder-block, rebar and brick barrio on the edges of Cali, Colombia, for the glare of stage lights and ESPN cameras-on-a-crane in the United States.