Dance Companies

Imagine that José Garces and Stephen Starr joined forces. Now imagine that instead of building a new facility lined with exotic decor and a model-pretty staff, these celebrity chefs used the partnership to develop their own culinary aesthetic, and put the pursuit of cuisine ahead of a restaurant's sustainability. A merger of similar stature and quality took place in the Philadelphia dance community recently, when dancer-choreographer Kate Watson-Wallace and choreographer-poet-impresario Jaamil Kosoko rechristened anonymous bodies, Watson-Wallace's company, as a joint collaborative for the pair's work.

Each year around this time, as they begin to plan their forthcoming seasons, Philadelphia's dance companies play a game of musical theaters. The game usually seems one without any winners. Blocked from the theaters they prefer - and can afford - by out-of-town troupes or local theatrical and musical productions, companies often must settle for houses that are too big or too small, too pricey or too out-of-the-way. Most of the time, these troupes feel lucky if they can find space at all. Although the experimental choreographer Trisha Brown has been known to deploy her dancers over rooftops and up and down walls, most dance companies prefer more conventional accommodations - space in which the dancers can move upright on a floor congenial to the feet; space with adequate room in the wings and lighting that does justice to the body's three dimensions; space that doesn't cost an arm and a leg, however nicely turned out they may be. And in Philadelphia, as in many other cities, such space scarcely exists.

Two dance companies - one from Tokyo, the other from Pittsburgh - combined for one strong brew Friday and Saturday at the University of the Arts' Drake Theater. A recent collaboration between Attack Theatre and the Japanese group Nibroll resulted in the sense-attacking piece No-to: memory fades that capped the program. Friday's show primed its audience with Nibroll's Let's Go to Mori's House, a fierce, disjointed work for two dancers, stage-sized video projection and some massive recorded sound.

Although deep into work with the Philadelphia Dance Company and her own dance school, Joan Myers Brown saw a problem that she could not ignore. Back then, in 1988, Brown also served on the board of Dance/USA (a national service organization based in Washington, D.C.). She noticed that such dance organizations were not interested in audiences of color, and they really did not want modern dance, preferring to focus on major ballet companies. "I knew there were problems that black companies were having and thought we might address them collectively," said Brown, the artistic and executive director of Philadanco in West Philadelphia.

It will be the biggest dance party ever held in Philadelphia. And the theme is the universal language of dance - especially how American modern dance has sprouted around the globe. 2000 Feet: A Celebration of World Dance, a combination festival and international conference, begins on Saturday. With about 25 international dance companies, ranging from Venezuela's Ballet Metropolitano de Caracas to Beijing's Chinese Folk Dance Group, 2000 Feet fits 25 performances - and dozens of other events - into a single week.

Performing with the Transitions Dance Company from England, Tom Dale (left) leaps from the stage at City Hall. Other dance companies from the United States and China performed at yesterday afternoon's show. The event was part of the weeklong "2,000 Feet: A Celebration of World Dance. "

Coming up with the first million - that was just a baby step. For a young dance company like the one assembled by Jeanne Ruddy, the next step is the hard part: turning an ambitious business plan into a nonprofit arts company that can thrive in the years to come. "It is a long haul," said Ruddy, 49, a respected modern-dance performer and teacher who has spent the last two years buying and renovating a three-building complex just off North Broad Street behind Benjamin Franklin High School.

Philadelphia's professional dance companies know how to dance. What they don't do as well is sell tickets. So before trying to build a long-sought "home for dance," the dance community must focus as much on business as it has on its art, a new study says. The study, "Building From the Inside Out," said that while a home for dance would be a benefit, the dance community should wait three to five years before proceeding with any plans for a central facility. The primary issue, the study said, is that most of the city's dance groups are tiny and do not have the business side of their operations in order.

A little over a year ago, things looked pretty good to Mike Pedretti, artistic director of Movement Theater International, an eclectic performance operation run out of the Tabernacle Church at 37th and Chestnut Streets. A nagging deficit was on the way down. Mime and clown and dance possibilities - MTI's major fare - were looking up. Yes, there was a recession, but Pedretti seemed relatively secure. "Many of the arts organizations in the community were suffering and operating with deficits," he said last week.

"In answer to President Barack Obama's call to service," says Jamie Merwin, artistic director of Olive Dance Theatre, "we are making this week's entire run at the Wilma Theater free to the public. "But," she added, "donations at the door are certainly hoped for. " Difficult times are nothing new for local dance companies, but things were just made a bit easier by a new Dance/USA Philadelphia program that will subsidize theater rentals for groups seeking good performance spaces.

Imagine that José Garces and Stephen Starr joined forces. Now imagine that instead of building a new facility lined with exotic decor and a model-pretty staff, these celebrity chefs used the partnership to develop their own culinary aesthetic, and put the pursuit of cuisine ahead of a restaurant's sustainability. A merger of similar stature and quality took place in the Philadelphia dance community recently, when dancer-choreographer Kate Watson-Wallace and choreographer-poet-impresario Jaamil Kosoko rechristened anonymous bodies, Watson-Wallace's company, as a joint collaborative for the pair's work.

After 12 years of creating dance, commissioning work from world-class choreographers, and opening a theater and studio in a converted mechanic's shop, former Martha Graham principal dancer Jeanne Ruddy announced Monday that she was folding her Philadelphia modern dance company. "I came to the decision that it was time for me to move on, and that I had done what it was that I had set out to do," Ruddy, 58, said in her office at the Performance Garage on Brandywine Street. She paused frequently to get her emotions in check, and drew her long, dark-blond hair up in a clip several times, before pulling it down again moments later.

As she neared her 99th birthday in March 2009, Yvonne Patterson told Inquirer columnist Art Carey: "I wasn't a great dancer and I wasn't pretty but I had a beautiful figure. " Good enough, she said, that she was one of the original dancers in George Balanchine's American Ballet. She was an approximate mix, Carey wrote, of "the regal bearing of actress Helen Mirren, the mordant wit of Dorothy Parker, the lust for adventure of Amelia Earhart, the cultured intellect of Susan Sontag and the physical vigor of Babe Didrikson.

Although deep into work with the Philadelphia Dance Company and her own dance school, Joan Myers Brown saw a problem that she could not ignore. Back then, in 1988, Brown also served on the board of Dance/USA (a national service organization based in Washington, D.C.). She noticed that such dance organizations were not interested in audiences of color, and they really did not want modern dance, preferring to focus on major ballet companies. "I knew there were problems that black companies were having and thought we might address them collectively," said Brown, the artistic and executive director of Philadanco in West Philadelphia.

"In answer to President Barack Obama's call to service," says Jamie Merwin, artistic director of Olive Dance Theatre, "we are making this week's entire run at the Wilma Theater free to the public. "But," she added, "donations at the door are certainly hoped for. " Difficult times are nothing new for local dance companies, but things were just made a bit easier by a new Dance/USA Philadelphia program that will subsidize theater rentals for groups seeking good performance spaces.

A world without Lisa Viola dancing in it is unthinkable. But, in fact, this is her final season with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, which began a three-day run at the Annenberg Center on Thursday night. If you've never seen Viola onstage, where she is the master of everything from anguished stillness to slapstick humor, you have only two more chances to do so. But there are plenty of other reasons to see the Taylor troupe - the 15 other cast members, all of whom are wonderful, plus two-thirds of the choreography (for Thursday's Program A, which will be repeated at today's matinee; Program B will be shown tonight)

A dance company, like a sports team, must raise money, balance books, secure venues, attract and cater to fans, funders and investors, scout great physical specimens, then train them and keep them working. But while, say, a soccer team can rely on public dollars to build it a new stadium, a dance company is pretty much on its own when it comes to finding the right space. The Koresh Dance Company has solved this problem handily in a deal with the Philadelphia Theatre Company (PTC)

This year's Dance Celebration program at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts has been a tribute to 50 years of rock-and-roll. I've seen several well-known dance companies take on the theme, blending popular music with their choreography. Most had mixed results, at best. So it was a nice surprise Thursday to find that by far the best of the attempts I've witnessed was the work of three Philadelphia-based choreographers. "The Music That Made Us Dance: From Lindy to Hip-Hop" was created by Roni Koresh, Myra Bazell and Brian Sanders, and conceived by Randy Swartz, Dance Celebration's artistic director.

Dance companies have been pairing great music with choreography for centuries, most often successfully. But the recent trend in setting dance to popular songs has had mixed results at best. David Parsons became the latest choreographer to try this - with a better outcome than most - Thursday night at the Annenberg Center's Zellerbach Theatre. The performance of his troupe, the Parsons Dance Company, was part of Dance Celebration's yearlong tribute to 50 years of rock-and-roll. "DMB," a Philadelphia premiere set to the music of the Dave Matthews Band, is a dance party of eight dancers in jeans and T-shirts.

Stella Chalfin Moore, 96, a dance impresario and patron formerly of Center City, died May 10 at Dunwoody Village in Newtown Square. In 1937, Mrs. Moore, a former dancer, organized a joint recital of ballet and modern dance, which were at aesthetic war with each other. She arranged newspaper publicity depicting a tug-of-war with ballet dancers on one end of the rope and modern dancers on the other. The performance was a great success, and dance companies began to seek her out when they needed funding and publicity.