Archive: Dance Writing, Reviews, and Podcasts

Join ARENA DANCES for our weekly Studio Stories podcast, where each week we reminisce on Twin Cities dance history with a new special guest. This week, we sat down with Stephanie Fellner Grey to learn about her journey.

Stephanie Fellner’s Minneapolis career now spans three decades. A member of The Ballet of the Dolls for 25 years, Stephanie originated numerous roles, including Rat Queen in Nutcracker…Not so Suite and the title role in Cinderella.

Tune in this Thursday, October 21, at 12:00pm to hear more about Stephanie’s insight on dance, life and the artistic process!

Available on our website or wherever you get your podcasts!

Join ARENA DANCES for our weekly Studio Stories Podcast, where each week we reminisce on Twin Cities dance history with a new special guest. This week, we sat down with Michael Engel to learn about his journey.

A long-standing pillar of the Twin Cities dance community, Engel has been a dancer, choreographer, teacher and artist for over three decades. He’s been a featured performer with the likes of Linda Shapiro and Leigh Dillard, Maria Cheng and Dancers, Patrick Scully’s Contact Works, The Guthrie Theater and countless others.

The intersection of Engel’s life as both artist and parent brings a unique perspective to his creative process: “For me, dancers who have managed to have full dance careers and a family have some very special interrelationships with their craft and with their children; experiences that go well beyond imagining how it is not easy to dance and be a parent.”

Visit http://www.arena-dances.org to listen, or check it out wherever you get your podcasts!

Join ARENA DANCES for our weekly Studio Stories Podcast, where each week we reminisce on Twin Cities dance history with a new special guest. This week, we sat down with Carl Flink to learn about his journey.

Carl is the head of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities dance program, leads the Nadine Jettee Sween Professor of Dance, and is the artistic director of Black Label Movement. Flink’s dancemaking is recognized for its intense athleticism, daring, and humanistic themes.

Tune in this Thursday, October 14, at 12:00pm to hear more about Carl’s incredible insight on dance, life and the artistic process!

Available on our website or wherever you get your podcasts!

 

Join ARENA DANCES for our weekly Studio Stories Podcast, where each week we reminisce on Twin Cities dance history with a new special guest. This week, we sat down with Joanie Smith to learn about her journey.

Founder and Choreographer of Shapiro & Smith Dance, Joanie Smith has been commissioned by companies as diverse as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Phoenix Dance Company of Leeds, UK; and the PACT Dance Company of Pretoria, South Africa.

Smith was recognized as an “Artist Of The Year” in 2011 by City Pages (Minneapolis), and was named a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Dance to Helsinki, Finland. Smith holds the Barbara Barker Endowed Chair in Dance at the University of Minnesota, an MA in Dance from UCLA, and toured the world in the companies of Murray Louis and Alwin Nikolais before founding Shapiro & Smith Dance.

Visit http://www.arena-dances.org to listen, or check it out wherever you get your podcasts!

Join ARENA DANCES for our weekly Studio Stories Podcast, where each week we reminisce on Twin Cities dance history with a new special guest, hosted by ARENA DANCES Artistic Director, Mathew Janczewski!

Visit http://www.arena-dances.org to listen, or check it out wherever you get your podcasts!

Join ARENA DANCES for our weekly Studio Stories Podcast, where each week we reminisce on Twin Cities dance history with a new special guest. This week, we sat down with Megan Mayer to learn about her journey.

Megan Mayer is an award-winning Minneapolis-based artist working with choreography, dance, experimental video and photography. She obsesses over transposition, minimalism, mimicry, tenderness, wry humor, loneliness, social anxiety, fake bad timing and exacting musicality. By exposing tiny emotional undercurrents concerning the body, she constructs a unique perspective of what dance can be: virtuosity in vulnerability and victory in gesture.

Visit http://www.arena-dances.org to listen, or check it out wherever you get your podcasts!

Join ARENA DANCES for our weekly Studio Stories Podcast, where each week we reminisce on Twin Cities dance history with a new special guest. This week, we sat down with Chris Schlichting to learn about his journey.

Chris Schlichting is a Minnesota-based choreographer, performer and dance enthusiast who believes in a flexible definition of dance. His choreography expresses itself as a tensile inclusion of dichotomies. Relying on the formality of structural investigation and the emotion of earnest expression, his dances evoke the grandiosity of spectacle and the delicacy of intimate moments. Chris develops dances outside the constraints of thematic and conceptual frameworks, allowing the choreographic process to develop focus through physical intuition and sensory awareness.

Visit http://www.arena-dances.org to listen, or check it out wherever you get your podcasts!

Join ARENA DANCES for our weekly Studio Stories Podcast, where each week we reminisce on Twin Cities dance history with a new special guest. This week, we sat down with Lou Fancher to learn about her journey.

Lou Fancher is a San Francisco Bay Area writer. Her work has been published by WIRED.com, Diablo Magazine, Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times, InDance, East Bay Express, Oakland Magazine, SF Weekly, and others.  She is a children’s book author, designer and illustrator, with over 50 books in print. Also a choreographer, ballet master and teacher, she coaches professional ballet and contemporary dance companies in the U. S. and Canada.

Visit http://www.arena-dances.org to listen, or check it out wherever you get your podcasts!

Join ARENA DANCES for our weekly Studio Stories Podcast, where each week we reminisce on Twin Cities dance history with a new special guest. This week, we sat down with Dustin Haug to learn about his journey.

Dustin Haug grew up in southern Minnesota and attended St. Olaf College. Although he was very active in the dance department and spent a good deal of time studying chemistry, he earned a BA in Visual Art in 2000. He moved to Seattle, WA after graduation and began working with KT Niehoff’s lingo dance theater in 2002, before moving back to the Twin Cities in 2007. Locally, he has shown his own work at The Walker Art Center’s Choreographer’s Evening, Zenon’s Dance Zone, Choreographer’s Evening at the Ritz, Bryant Lake Bowl, and SPCPA’s Evening of Dance. He has also had the pleasure of working with numerous local choreographers such as Body Cartography Project, Rosy Simas Danse, Patrick Scully, Maggie Bergeron and Dancers, and Chris Schlichting. Dustin joined Mathew Janczewski’s ARENA DANCES in 2013 to help create and perform the evening-length work The Main Street Project. He has taught modern dance and contact improvisation at Zenon Dance School since 2008; dance, chemistry, and physics at St. Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists from 2008-present.

Visit http://www.arena-dances.org to listen, or check it out wherever you get your podcasts!

Join ARENA DANCES for our weekly Studio Stories Podcast, where each week we reminisce on Twin Cities dance history with a new special guest. This week, we sat down with Lori Mercil to learn about her journey. 

In addition to earning a BFA in Dance from the U of MT, Lori earned summer scholarships for further study at the Martha Graham School in NYC, and Repertory Dance Theater in Salt Lake City, and has taught and/or performed ballet, jazz, modern, and creative movement in Montana, Oregon, Japan, and the Twin Cities. Locally, Lori has taught jazz, modern, ballet, hip hop, and creative movement at various locations, including Ballare Teatro, Elev8, Zenon, and Young Dance. Lori currently dances with the Christopher Watson Dance Company, and MotionArt, and has danced with Becky Heist, Hauser Dance, Karla Grotting, Link Vostok , Marciano Silva dos Santos, Marylee Hardenbergh, Off-Leash Area, and Una Setia. Lori has shown her own work at Hauser Dance, Kinetic Kitchen, Dances at the Lakes, and Solstice River, and is currently co-producer/choreographer for Global Water Dances, Minneapolis, and 16 Feet (an annual choreographers’ showcase).

Visit http://www.arena-dances.org to listen, or check it out wherever you get your podcasts!