Dancers

Each year, the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute, under the aegis of fashion doyenne Diana Vreeland, mounts a 10-month show that often has a direct influence on contemporary clothing. Vreeland, the former editor of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, is known for being a powerfully prescient muse in these matters. The current exhibit, "Dance," has proved to be no exception. Even before the Met show opened in Manhattan in December, miles of tulle and pouf dance skirts had been introduced for spring in Europe and New York.

It's a day like any day for dancers in the 1990s, filled with sexism, racism, AIDS, physical challenges - and unrequited love. Or so Marla Blakey's one-act play, "The Dancers," which received its first local performance last night at the Society Hill Playhouse, would have us believe. There is a fascination with dancers' backstage life and training that sometimes seems to far exceed interest in their on-stage performances. People apparently can't get enough of the suffering and deprivation, yet rarely ask why dancers willingly, even happily, pursue such an arduous life.

Philadanco's Wednesday opening-night concert proved there are at least three reasons to go: the dancers, the dancers, and the dancers. The company wraps up its 30th-anniversary season at the Prince Music Theater through . On the Shoulders of Our Ancestors is billed as an evening-length work, but it is really a loose suite of four works held together by screened excerpts from a television documentary to run next year on PBS, Free to Dance....

Filmmaker Maya Deren had completed only a few short films when she died at 44 of a brain hemorrhage in 1961. But her small body of work is recognized for its dreamlike power, and she is considered one of the most important avant-garde filmmakers ever. A new documentary about Deren, In the Mirror of Maya Deren, by Martina Kudl?cek, is the centerpiece of a film series at the Prince Music Theater this weekend. "Motion Pictures: A Moving Collaboration Between Filmmakers and Dancers" will screen a number of films featuring dancers.

Benjamin Franklin may have harnessed electricity in Philadelphia, but for the audience at the Annenberg Center for the Arts Thursday night, Grupo Corpo Brazilian Dance Theater embodied it. Grupo Corpo commissioned Philip Glass and Uakti (wah-kee-chi), the renowned Brazilian ensemble that makes its own instruments, to create the opening work Seven or Eight Pieces for a Ballet. Evoking rivers of the Amazon basin, it has since been recorded on the CD Aguas da Amazonia (Point Music)

Four years ago, Gin MacCallum appeared like an apparition in a solo performance choreographed and performed by her - a diminutive tornado of movement, surefootedly destroying any doubts that might lie in her path about her talent. In her first full-length choreography, "In the Shape of a Spider," performed over the weekend at Christ Church, the surefootedness was still there and so was the choreography for her strong soloists, but she was not so successful in massing her group of six unevenly matched dancers.

Tommy Tune didn't want any dancers for the cast of his newest Broadway project, Stepping Out, even though Tune is a dancer and choreographer himself, and even though the play is about dancing. The play, which has been running for several years in London and opens here tonight, is about a group of people - eight women and one man - who get together one night a week for a tap-dancing class. It's a sort of social event for them, besides being a way of getting in shape. "It was very important that they not know how to tap," Tune said the other day, his first day off almost since rehearsals began early last month.

Dance teachers normally don't need to worry about thunderstorms. But Jane Roosevelt, founder of Longwood Performing Arts, does. For the last four years, her students have put on a free outdoor dance recital at the pavilion in Anson B. Nixon Park in Kennett Square. "There is nothing like dancing outside," she said. "The backdrop of the trees and the lake is unbelievable. . . . It's a perfect place. " Dancer Caroline Pennartz, 18, said she enjoys having the audience so close.

When the Australian Dance Theater came to Dance Celebration at Annenberg Center in 2002, a longshoremen's strike held up its set on the West Coast. This week, Homeland Security officials were holding the Sydney Dance Company's set for artistic director Graeme Murphy's eagerly awaited American premiere of Ellipse. It sat for two weeks on a New York dock waiting to be X-rayed until a senatorial phone call released it - not in time, though, for Thursday night's opening show. But while we might have been protected from an Aussie attack by set, we were not safe from their attaque by dance.

The 16 dance numbers in the 2009 Garden State Dance Festival's two-weekend run at Rutgers-Camden's Walter K. Gordon Theater offer a kaleidoscopic glimpse of what emerging dancers can do when matched with established choreographers. Several of the works in last weekend's opener were highly polished, mobile - and as colorful as stained glass. They ranged in genres from ballet to boogie, pas de deux to large ensemble. Among the best works - and repeating tomorrow - is Camille A. Brown's excerpt from her larger one-woman piece, The Evolution of a Secured Feminine.

A knotted drama of terrorism and double agentry set in Belfast in the early 1990s, Shadow Dancer boasts a fiercely focused performance from Andrea Riseborough as Collette McVeigh, a Northern Ireland IRA member arrested after an aborted bombing in a London Underground station. Clive Owen is the MI5 detective who tracks her down - and convinces her to turn against her Republican confreres. She wears a red raincoat. They meet on a windswept quay. It's the stuff of spy movie romances, of John le Carré, but then the brutal realities of the Troubles kick in. Directed by James Marsh, who made the Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire (with its thrilling, heistlike reenactments)

The Pennsylvania Ballet closes its 2013 spring season with an artistically varied program that is emotionally and intellectually satisfying. At the Academy of Music on Thursday night, the curtain rose on 12 dancers, backs to the audience, walking forward, taking steps back, making half-turns, adding more dance moves until they broke rank. The women in long-sleeved gowns, the men in blouses and straight trousers (by John Macfarlane, who also designed the moody set based on a Munch painting)

Whoever conceived of a tour joining electro-pop's princess with the anthemic Latin hip-hop cheerleader is a bloody genius. On paper, there's little to connect the dots between Ke$ha and Pitbull. Yet, on the stage of the Grand at the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City - on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, yet - their common denominator was loud, garish fun. Subtlety was in short supply. Though a double-headliner show, much of the female-heavy audience was made up like Ke$ha, mimicking her warrior streaks and glittery face paint while shouting along to her expletive-rich lyrics.

Like Mother Nature - where would we all be without DNA? - Gertrude Stein was fond of repetition. As she wrote in her novel The Making of Americans , "Repeating is the whole of living and by repeating comes understanding. " Well, I wonder. Or I did until I watched a good portion of a nearly hour-long film called Fase at the Institute of Contemporary Art. The film, by Belgian Thierry De Mey, focuses on two female dancers as they execute a series of synchronized spins and movements that suggest vigorous calisthenics.

After 44 years on - and more recently off - the stage, Dance Theatre of Harlem opened Thursday night at the Annenberg Center. It was a welcome return, and the company looked both young and sophisticated. Led by founding member and longtime principal dancer Virginia Johnson, the troupe was on hiatus for eight years after facing a debt of more than $2 million. When the curtain went down in 2004, the company had 44 dancers. Now, it's performing with just 18. This week's tour to Philadelphia brought two artists home.

Frederic Franklin, 98, an exuberant, British-born ballet dancer who was an early inspiration for the choreographers George Balanchine and Agnes de Mille, died Saturday at a New York hospital. He had complications from pneumonia, said his partner, William Ausman. Long after most dance careers end, he continued to be an important force in the ballet community, serving as its living library and oral historian. Mr. Franklin's impeccable attention to detail, uncanny memory, and extensive experience with key choreographers and dancers made him uniquely suited to serve as a coach for a new generation of artists.

The opening of the Come Together Festival at Suzanne Roberts Theatre on Thursday night showed just four reasons critics consider Philadelphia the country's top dance city (outside the Big Apple). This festival of 27 established and emerging companies spotlights only a sliver of the richness of our dance culture. World-renowned Rennie Harris Puremovement set the pace with Continuum (1997), for five company members and guest dancers. Battling it out with serial solos in a circle of light, and cheered on by their mates, Dinita Askew and Katia Cruz were jewels in Harris' crown of astonishing dancers.

The man who many believe is the main reason for the 76ers' disastrous season appears to be taking things in rhythmic stride. Weeks after undergoing arthroscopic surgery on both knees, Andrew Bynum can be seen treading lightly through the vigorous Gypsy dance in a 41-second video clip Cafe de Chinitas in Madrid, Spain, posted Monday on its Facebook page. Judging by his moves, the Sixers center appears to be recovering well from surgery. There's no harm in dancing on vacation.

NEW YORK - Hundreds of young women from around the world are kicking their dance routines into high gear in New York this week. They're vying to appear with the Rockettes at the 2013 Radio City Christmas Spectacular. The aspiring dancers lined up yesterday on a Manhattan street outside Radio City Music Hall for the open audition. Their hair was pulled back. Their makeup was perfect, and they all wore tan-colored, high-heeled shoes. They were taken into a rehearsal studio to learn a dance routine, then performed three-by-three in front of a panel of judges.

For seven years, BalletX has held sway on the Avenue of the Arts at its home stage in the Wilma Theater. Their Wednesday-evening spring run opener had three world premieres that began with the very dark - in all senses - Instantly Bound and ended with the bright, lighthearted Stations of Mercury . BalletX artistic directors Matthew Neenan and Christine Cox chose choreographers for this program that had me wondering about the connection between...