Elevate Difference

Reviews tagged dance

Nrityagram: The Love of Dance

In the film Nrityagram: The Love of Dance, a short and simple story is told. A woman finds purpose in her was life when she learns how to dance and creates an institute to instruct others. It is the story of Protima Bedi and her Nrityagram Dance Ensemble. Protima Bedi was known in India as a socialite, until she saw a Narissi Dance and came to pursue it instead. A woman who was known as an emotionally vibrant and open person, pursues a dance form that is tells the story of feelings more than anything else.

Hibiki (Resonance from Far Way) (10/20/2010)

The dancing performed by the Japanese butoh company Sankai Juku in Hibiki (Resonance from Far Away) at the Harris Theater in Chicago, Illinois, manages to invoke simultaneously everything and nothing. In choosing the word ‘everything,’ I am attempting to describe the fact that the six dancers and their choreographer execute actions that remind the viewer, possibly, of children, stones, priests, frogs, soldiers, streams, women, the wind, and a flower.

Soul Leaves Her Body (10/08/2010)

In today’s digital age, people often communicate with each other via computer and cell phone screens rather than face to face. In recent years, Here Arts Center has taken the difficult leap of transporting this contemporary feeling of being disconnected (and yet overconnected) via the coldness of technology to the theater stage through their resident artist productions.

Perfect Harmony

At the start of Perfect Harmony, a narrator tells the audience that the Acafellas, an all-male acapella singing group, have won the last eighteen high school singing competitions. What’s more, we’re told that they were the inspiration for “that show.” Like Glee, Perfect Harmony celebrates dorkiness, this time in an elite private high school. Five male songsters—two of them grandsons of the Acafellas’ founders—are itching for their nineteenth win. The obstacle?

Monica Droga: Indie Musician, Bollywood Star, Feminist

Gone are the times when people would migrate only to the West to find better lives. Now we witness a reversal of sorts, with NRIs going back to India to seek the same opportunities that their parents or grandparents had left India to find. Monica Dogra is one such NRI who is rocking the independent music scene in the homeland.

El Espiritu De La Salsa (The Spirit of Salsa)

I love to dance, but I am not gifted with quick feet. As a teen, this made me a hesitant and awkward dance student. Thankfully, when I discovered African dance, it changed my outlook in many positive ways. In the first year, my intimate class included a grandmother in her seventies and her teenage granddaughter. By creating art through movement together, we also created community and bonds similar to an extended family.

Aphrodite

Who can hate Kylie? She’s an Aussie superstar in Europe, Britain’s most beloved celebrity, and a global gay icon. She survived several decades in the entertainment business, even flourished there, and perhaps most impressively, also beat breast cancer. After she finished chemo in 2006, she headed back to the studio.

Flesh Tone

Kelis has always been brazen, unapologetically growling her way onto the music scene in 1999 with the single “Caught Out There,” a vicious tale of heartbreak and revenge.

Leading Ladies

It may seem quite an impossibility, but the film Leading Ladies is, simply put, a quietly revolutionary dance musical. While most dance musicals (think Dirty Dancing, Save the Last Dance) center on the boy-meets-girl heterosexual love match, Leading Ladies is a beautifully wrought girl-meets-girl story.

Afghan Star

One of my favorite bands, The Avett Brothers, have a lyric in one of their songs claiming, “May you never be embarrassed to sing.” Since viewing Havana Marking’s documentary, Afghan Star, this lyric has been on repeat in my brain, reminding me, as Afghan Star aptly illustrates, if embarrassment is all that we have to risk, the

Bad City

Saadi is in love with music. It's fun to guess where the loops and tracks come from on their debut album, Bad City. Their influences are far-ranging, and combine '70s dance, '80s synth, choir vocals, and traditional Arabic music. The title track is a solid dance anthem. The song's companion remix is particularly hot, too.

Gotta Dance

Gotta Dance opens with a scene of an energetic NBA game, with all the halftime mascot antics and acrobatic dance routines we’ve come to expect. But the New Jersey Nets are trying out something different this year.

The Theory of Tides

Oceans and tides have served as artistic muses for centuries, and I was curious to listen to music inspired by a scientific theory that explains "the dynamics of fluidity, the pull of bodies in motion, the ebb and flow of attraction." Upon first and second listen, The Theory of Tides didn’t grab me, but the third time around was a charm, and I found myself appreciating the music more. Lead singer Mirana has the kind of voice that can sound almost dissonant at times, but it suits The Theory of Tides' style of music, which has the feel of urban techno pop.

Second Annual International Body Music Festival (12/5/2009)

Body Music is an inherently populist art form. You just need a body, your hands, your feet, your mouth, the ground, a sense of rhythm, or any of these elements in any combination. Body Music has been around forever, created and passed down through generations of people from all parts of the world, and often serves as an expression of freedom in the face of oppression. The Herbst Theater, on the other hand, is a fancy schmancy theater decorated in ornate European style, whose very architecture denotes class and spectacle.

Hung Like A Horse

Members of The Locust and Some Girls make up the edgy electro-punk industrial outfit All Leather, mixing angelic screeching over electro beats and spastic hardcore pummeling, which are all packed tight into ten glorious minutes of the [Hung Like a Horse](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002HWUU8G?ie=UTF8&tag=feminrevie-20&linkC

Beatdown

In my mind, you either love drum and bass or you hate it—or you have no idea what it is. Pretty much indistinguishable from other Fabric mix albums and the Fabriclive series releases, this is the second d&b-heavy Scratch Perverts addition to the Fabric Records discography.

Sins Invalid (10/04/2009)

As a dancer, I feel most alive when I'm present in my body; when I breathe hard, feel the power of my feet on the ground, and sense the weight in my head and arms.

Forbidden Sun Dance

My body belongs to me. I make the choice of whether or not I use contraception, dance like a silly garden gnome, use drugs like booze, and paint my toenails green or pink or leave them natural.

Feed the Animals

When I heard the first Girl Talk album a few years back, I was pretty excited. It isn’t like remixing is innovative, nor is Gregg Gillis fashioning a new art form (even if he has made it more fashionable again).

Hard Candy

The great thing about following Madonna’s musical career is to see just exactly what sort of musical guise she’s going to adopt next. She’s always been heralded for her chameleon-like ability to change her image, but she’s equally restless with her musical style, letting her brand of dance-pop change along with her image. Her latest, her last for long-time label Warner Brothers, before her switch over to the record-breaking deal she inked with Live Nation, _Hard Candy _partners Madonna with some of the best urban-pop producers working today.
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