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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.