DancerMusic Editor Kristi Licera recently had the chance to speak with Jan Bartoszek on the eve of Hedwig Dances' 35th anniversary concert about how she has kept her creativity alive and to get insights to her latest work, "Raum." Here's what she told us:
Choreographer and dancer Rigoberto Saura started making dance in his youth and has spent his time since then honing his craft. Here's what Rigoberto told us about how his experiences in Chicago, Ecuador, Cuba and most recently Los Angeles have shaped his choreographic approach and career:
Hedwig Dances brings together choreographers Rigoberto Saura and Taimy Ramos in "SEA LEVEL: Above and Below". We asked these rising choreographers about Saura's "The Flowering Mechanism" and Ramos' "A Flor de Piel", and here's what they told us:
Collaboration is inevitably a form of exploration, and it often turns out that those artists who are most open to exploring the shared creativity of collaboration are also the boldest in their search for other kinds of creative exploration. Jan Bartoszek's career has been a master class in this principle. Dance, of course, is almost always a complex cooperation between choreographer, dancers, designers and many others, but Bartoszek has made such creative cooperation both a priority and an art in her work, often in innovative and boundary-defying ways. When Hedwig Dances present's Bartoszek's newest work Futura on November 1st through 3rd, the audiences at The Dance Center of Columbia College will get to see a multi-dimensional example of how she does this, and of how rich the results can be. We asked Jan to tell us more about the revolutionary ideas of Bauhaus, its influence on so much of what we know today, and how she and her collaborators imagined Futura. Here's what she told us:
Nobody ever got the idea to become a dancer by reading the Encyclopedia of Easy Jobs. It's an exceptionally demanding profession, and one of its constantly recurring challenges is discovering and deciding where to even try to work. Side by side with the widely varied possibilities in Concert Dance is a parallel but largely separate universe: Commercial Dance, and that can be a wide world, in many different ways. DancerMusic spoke to Hedwig Dances' Crystal Gurrola, to find out about one kind of opportunity that a dancer may encounter -- accepting the opportunity to dance commercially overseas. Here's what Crystal told us about her time dancing in Japan.
Hedwig Dances' current presentation of "Vanishing Points", a full length program of four original choreographic works, is so imaginative and effective that you have a feeling of seeing something brand new.
