Tonight’s Juneteenth Celebration at New York’s Lincoln Center was a reflective, fresh, and vibrant source of inspiration for all participants. This nonpareil venue inspired artistic expression and creativity with its lustrous modernist designs, magnificent facades, soaring columns, and capacious plazas. It was a celebration of elegance, sumptuousness, and breathtaking transcendence.
With seamless changes and intertwining of partners, the eye-catching dance was astonishing, with an abrupt end to the dance and the music, which brought about a resounding standing ovation from the audience.
The Art Bath Salon Series program was 21st century-multimedia at its finest, but with the intimacy of the Parisian salons made famous by the likes of Gertrude Stein, Gustave Courbet, and Franz Liszt. In this inviting artistic environment with stimulating badinage, patrons experienced and marveled at film, sculpture, painting, dance, photography, and music created by world-class artists and performers.
The Mayo Performing Arts Center (MPAC) stage transformed into a ballroom for the dazzling January 19th double performance of Dancing with the Stars (DWTS) Live 2023 tour, co-hosted by American television personality Gabby Windey and English-born dancer and choreographer Emma Slater.
Raconteur and narrator Louis Mofsie (Hopi/Winnebago) guided us through the majestic proclamations of dances, storytelling, and music representing the magnificence and provenance of these rich cultures. The coruscating colors and movements portrayed themes associated with rituals, reverence, and prayers to a Creator for blessings, health and thanksgiving, gladness for the life-giving forces of animals and rain, community pride, and honor to their warriors who protect them.
If the 17-piece Kevin Blanq big band and Kathryn Farmer were not enough to get you in the mood for smooth swinging and dancing, the urbane, bespoke, and suave dancer extraordinaire Manuel Rojas appeared to deliver a dance lesson at 8:30 as a second band, Swing a Delic arrived on stage. With Rojas, it was time to revel in the legacies of Al Minns and Frankie Manning with Lindy Hop, swing outs, tuck-in-turn, jazz, tap, sugar foot walk, breakaway, and swing dance….dum-dee-dum, dum-dee-dum, dum-dee-dum, dum-dee-dum. Revelers thronged to the dance floor as the buoyant and joyous Rojas drew them in.
New Jersey Ballet at MPAC in Hallelujah Junction featured nine company ballerinas and danseurs draped in the sartorial elegance of black and white attire metaphorically linked both to the keys of a piano and the musically rich, cyclic intones of Adams’s oeuvre.
New York City Center presented the fourth installment of its Fall For Dance Festival, a trio of spectacular, diverse dance offerings and celebration of dance and music, a magical fusion of parallel art forms that expressed the rich sonic and visual imaginings of composers and choreographers alike.
This superb venue in beautiful Neidorff-Karpati Hall at the Manhattan School of Music concluded a three-week festival featuring dance choreography set to the music of J. S. Bach performed by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, conducted by Donald York.