Breaking Boundaries: METdance’s Big Year
After twenty years of success, a dance company might find itself hard-pressed to top itself season after season—but not the team at METdance.
Dance
Performania: Houston Ballet’s Fresh Nutcracker
Houston Ballet is throwing a little holiday get-together, at least that's what it looks like from my seat at the front of the rehearsal room as the company enacts the famous party scene from the Nutcracker.
A Culture Collective: Art Outside the Therapy Hour
In the months following our two comedy improvisation classes with Beta Theater last year, our teacher, actor Jerry Emeka remarked candidly, “I could not for the life of me figure out what your collective ‘deal’ was.”
Identity and Mortality with ARCOS Dance
ARCOS Dance is known as an experimental platform for dance technology – a merging together of bodies in space and digital creation. It’s like a modern brand of philosophy, an embodiment of human history alongside a projection of its uncertain future.
Riveting & Rare: CORE Presents Dance from Israel at Miller
When Niv Sheinfeld, Keren Levi and Oren Laor's Big Mouth started with a pedestrian walking pattern I knew to pay attention.
The Dance of Work: Forklift Danceworks reflects on past projects and looks to the future
Convention is not a part of Allison Orr’s vocabulary. The Forklift Danceworks artistic director has carved out a particular niche in the site-specific performance world of Texas—one that draws attention to the people and systems that keep our communities ticking, often without thanks or notice. This is Orr’s specialty: bringing the invisible to the forefront.
Badge of Honor: SMU Dance Grads Impact Texas Dance
Southern Methodist University’s Meadows School of the Arts in Dallas is home to one of the nation’s most highly regarded and rigorous dance programs.
Sea & Space: Karen Stokes Mines Houston’s History
All too often choreographers of modern dance present work based on material they without question know and understand: their own life stories, experiments based on individual movement practices, or explorations of thematic content that shoot out of their imaginations.
Learn/Imagine: Pablo Helguera at DiverseWorks
Pablo Helguera's exhibition The Fable is to be Retold at DiverseWorks (on view through Nov. 19) opened with a performance recital in five parts, each of which considers the ways we learn and imagine, evoked through the lens of youth.
Dance/USA Conference Convenes in Austin
The Dance/USA conference was held in Austin this past June, a first for the capital and the organization’s second visit to Texas (Houston, 2009). For me, it was a chance to hobnob with my peers from all over the US, expand my arts toolbox with the broad spectrum of talks and workshops and to spend some much-needed quality time with the Austin Dance community.
Sixty Years Later…With Ballet Austin
As Ballet Austin celebrates its sixth decade of performance, the company is a beehive of rehearsals and rumpus.
Powerful Presence: CORE Presents Dance from Israel at Miller
If movement can reveal a national identity and specific cultural context, then the dance work of Israel is defined by a heightened sense of immediacy.