Where Were You Sitting?

Billie Who?

"Blueprint of a Lady: The Once and Future Life of Billie Holiday"
Nnenna Freelon and Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE
Eisenhower Theater
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington, DC
December 7, 2006

by Alexandra Tomalonis
copyright 2006 by Alexandra Tomalonis

It sounded like a good idea: a collaborative peformance between a singer (Nnenna Freelon) and a choreographer (Ronald K. Brown) to celebrate the world of Billie Holiday, using Holiday's music as the unifying device. At least this promised lots of good music. Many of Holiday's signature songs were included: "God Bless the Child," "What is a Lady?", "Now Baby or Never," "What a Little Moonlight Can Do" and about a half-dozen others. Freelon moved throughout the piece (approximately one hour, plus intermission), interacting with the dancers, sometimes seeming to be a part of Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE, sometimes commenting on what the the dancers were doing, sometimes making the dancers seem imaginary, dancing out Holiday's struggles and dreams. It really was a nice idea.

A Whole Lotta Dancing

New Voices
CityDance Ensemble
Terrace Theater
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington, D.C.
Saturday, March 13, 2004

by Alexandra Tomalonis
copyright 2004 by Alexandra Tomalonis

It isn’t every Saturday night I leave a dance concert yearning for a time machine that will wiz me back to 1930s New York so I can starve in a garret and dance for Martha, but, then, it isn’t every Saturday night I get to see Jane Dudley’s Harmonica Breakdown, either. Dudley’s spare and jubilant ode to American Depression Era persistence is part of CityDance Ensemble’s admirable Legacy Program, intended to preserve the best of the past.

Tracing a New Version of The American Dream

Tracings
Dana Tai Soon Burgess & Co.
Terrace Theater
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
November 6, 2003

By Alexandra Tomalonis
copyright © 2003 by Alexandra Tomalonis

Say "American immigrants" and the picture that's ingrained in our collective brain is one of people crowded together on the deck of a ship, or standing, numbed and exhausted, in Ellis Island's endless lines. That's the long shot. The close up is a black and white photo, perhaps from a history text, perhaps from our own family album. When we see their faces, we see worry, expectation, pride and (perhaps because we've been told it's there) hope. The overwhelming color is black.  Black dresses, black hair, black caps, black suits, black suitcases. A sea of darkness, befitting people who had fled political oppression, pogroms, famine or grinding poverty to find a new life in the New World. The stories that go with those photos are often ones of cruelty and terror. Hope, yes, but anger too at what had caused the journey.

Compagnie Jant-Bi of Senegal

by Alexandra Tomalonis
Special to The Washington Post
April 9, 2001      

tMen in business suits, standing ankle deep in sand, delicately drink water served to them in tiny cups; men with briefcases exchange handshakes, at times warm, at times aggressive, the power balance eloquently expressed by the smallest  shifts of weight and gesture. Compagnie Jani-Bi of Senegal’s “Le  coq est mort” is full of such pictures, which tweak our ideas of man and his relationship with nature, and with his own nature.

Tatiana Baganova

Provincial Dances Theatre

by Alexandra Tomalonis
Special to The Washington Post
April 23, 2003

In Tatiana  Baganova’s “Wings at Tea,” the Devil plays a cello and  a pig flies. Both pieces shown by Baganova’s Provincial Dances Theatre  at Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater Wednesday night explore the human condition with a healthy dose of whimsy.      

Baganova is a story teller. Her dances are a series of vignettes that unfold slowly,  as though told at a winter tea party where no one is in a particular hurry to walk home in the cold.

Shen Wei's Waking Dream

Shen Wei Dance Arts

By Alexandra Tomalonis
Special to The Washington Post
October 24, 2001      

Shen Wei  Dance Art’s “Near the Terrace,” a danced dreamscape unveiled at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater Tuesday night,  is beautiful and wondrously strange. Dancers, dressed only in pale blue skirts, their bodies powdered white, walk with measured tread and fall, in slow motion, into each other’s arms. Someone is always moving--walking,  crawling, rolling--yet there is little movement. The dancers repeat movements  endlessly as though caught in a dream, unable to run, unable to escape danger, but there is no fear, only serenity.

Wasla': Timeless Movement

Compagnie Fattoumi Lamoureux
by Alexandra Tomalonis
Special to The Washington Post
May 4, 2000

The world that Compagnie Fattoumi Lamoureux creates on stage is part North African, part French, a reflection of the interests and background of its choreographers, Héla Fattoumi and Eric Lamoureux. Movement, atmosphere, and especially the stunning lighting of designer Urvan Letroiga, made the Kennedy Center’s tiny Terrace Theater stage seem as constricted as the courtyards of an ancient city, and as infinite as the desert.

Ballet Preljocaj

By Alexandra Tomalonis

Special to The Washington Post
October 14, 2002      

Anjelin Preljocaj has a well-deserved reputation for being bold and provocative. The two  works his Ballet Preljocaj brought to the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater Friday night teased the brain as well as the senses, and his dancers are as gorgeous and invincible as any around.      

In “Helikopter,”  Preljocaj responds to the difficult, grating score--Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 1994 work, “Helikopter Quartet,” composed for four violins  and four helicopters--as an abstract painter might. He takes and breaks  images of rotation and flight, at times using the six dancers to construct  shapes like living Tinker Toys, at times sending them through the air   like flying rotor blades--or swastikas.

Evolutions: Four Ailey Classics

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

Alexandra Tomalonis
Special to The Washington Post
May 21, 2001; Page C6

Fledgling  novelists are often advised to “write about what you know.”  The same might be good advice for dance makers. Alvin Ailey made dances  about what he knew, and his vivid and affectionate characterizations resonate  with audiences around the world, even those who have never been to Harlem,     nor sat, choking on Texas dust, under a broiling summer sun.      

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater danced four of its founder’s most enduring pieces Friday night at the Kennedy Center Opera House and, despite changes  in technique (the movement seems concentrated more in the limbs than the  torso now), danced them with the spirit the works demand.