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Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute
Bulletin, November 2004
Experience the technical excellence and unparalleled dramatic power of Buglisi/Foreman Dance at 8 p.m. on Saturday, November 6 at Wellin Hall on the Hamilton College campus. The theatrical appeal of their diverse repertory and dramatic intensity has won this company many invitations to prestigious international venues and dance series. Founded in 1994 by Jacqulyn Buglisi and Donlin Foreman with Terese Capucilli and Christine Dakin, this distinguished quartet, who danced together as principal artists with Martha Graham for two decades, now broaden the boundaries of their great legacy. With a company of 12 dancers they have defined a new dynamic lyricism and developed a richly diverse and expressive repertory that is unique, accessible and vibrant, communicating through dance “deep matters of the heart.”
They have inherited a theatrical mastery of lighting, costumes and stage space, a way of making us feel that each dance is an encounter with destiny— The New York Times
This performance is made possible, in part, by the New York State DanceForce, a state-wide consortium of choreographers, arts organizations, presenters and educators. The New York State DanceForce receives major sponsorship from the New York State Council o the Arts and Altria. Additional support is provided by JPMorgan Chase and the National Endowment for the Arts. Administered by Dance Theater Workshop and Dancspace Project, DanceForce programs include artist residencies, community outreach activities and dance programming that link artists and communities across New York State .
The Mohawk Valley Dance partnership is a consortium of three community partners; Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Hamilton College and the Central New York Community Arts Council Arts in Education Institute, organizations dedicated to the advancement of an understanding of dance across a broad spectrum of the community, inspiring people to make dance a meaningful part of their lives. For tickets, contacts the Performing arts ticket office at 797-0055 or (800) 754-0797.
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Bellingham Weekly
“Girl’s Night Out”
May 1-8, 2003, Bellingham, Washington
….
Saturday night found me at WWU’s Performing Arts Center for the
Buglisi/Foreman Dance Company’s breathtaking presentation of contemporary
theatrical dance. Buglisi and Foreman, who were principal dancers with
Martha Graham’s company for 20 years, brought both chills and laughter
to the surface as the choreography and composition of the different pieces
made it oh-so-obvious that artistic freedom is alive and well from New
York City to Bellingham. Rich, detailed costumes, taut bodies in motion,
spectacular lighting and the astonishing talents of two world-class choreographers
made for an evening of pure viewing pleasure.
_Amy Kepferle
Boston
Herald
DANCE REVIEW; A high pointe for Pillow:
By Theodore Bale. Jul 28, 2003. pg. 030
Nacho Duato's Compania Nacional de Danza 2 and Buglisi/Foreman Dance at
Jacob's Pillow
Dance Festival, Saturday.
The legacy of the modern tradition as it continues to unfold in Europe
and America was the featured theme this past weekend at Jacob's Pillow
Dance Festival in Becket. Three different shows proved how astonishing
it is to observe the artistic seeds, planted decades ago by master choreographers
such as Jiri Kylian and Martha Graham, blooming in the present with such
passion and precision.
…
At the Doris Duke Theater, Buglisi/Foreman Dance asserted the tradition
of Graham's forceful technique without shaking the death rattle of American
modernism, an admirable feat. …the performers are glorious. "Suite:
Arms Around Me" and "Lisa D." (the latter danced to a radiant
score for string quartet by Lisa DeSpain) were the most imaginative and
inspired.
The
Charlotte Observer
Program showcases dance diversity
By Meg Freeman Whalen
Special to the Observer
CHARLOTTE, N.C. – The N.C. Dance Theatre marketed this season's
"Innovative Works" program as "unique, unbound, up close."
Thursday night's performance in the intimate Booth Playhouse certainly
lived up to the ad.
With eight dances that ranged from gritty to goofy, elegant to erotic,
the program showcased the diverse talents of the dancers and choreographers.
Salvatore Aiello's "The Afternoon of a Faun" opened the show.
Set to Debussy's impressionist music, the ballet floats in that dim place
between dreaming and wakefulness, as a faun is seduced by nymphs in gossamer
gowns.
Uri Sands was a mesmerizing faun, combining quick, animal movements with
languorous sensuality. The lovely long-haired nymphs glowed in the rich
golden light, sometimes shyly erotic, sometimes boldly so.
After such serious attraction, Heather Maloy's "Couch Potatoes,"
the story of the overpowering allure of a couch, was inanely funny. Choreographed
for two men and a woman (a hilarious Kati Hanlon Mayo), this piece could
have been subtitled "50 ways to use your sofa." A hideous couch
became a balance beam, a springboard – even a ship – on which
the dancers lounged, lunged and belly-flopped.
Several works explored the push and pull between couples, most beautifully
Donlin Foreman's "So I May Say," a duet danced by Sands and
Traci Gilchrest. In this lovely work, the dancers often move in unison,
requiring exquisite technique. Sands and Gilchrest were perfectly matched.
Their movements were so well synchronized that there was no doubt that
the two characters belonged together, in spite of periodic antagonism.
Two intense large-group works demonstrated excellent collaboration among
the company: Jason Jacobs' "Flow Form" (a new work) and Alonzo
King's "Tango." Both sizzle, but the smoky, sultry "Tango"
appears this weekend only. Don't miss this sexy and invigorating piece.
Innovative Works
N.C. Dance Theatre presents eight works.
When: 8 p.m. tonight and Saturday and April 11-12; 7:30 p.m. April 10
Where: Booth Playhouse, N.C. Performing Arts Center
Tickets: $17-$26
Details: (704) 372-1000; www.ncdance.org
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Excerpts
The Dallas Morning News
Review: Dance Salad tosses modern touch into ballet mix
Excess is the main feast when talent from four continents congregates
By MARGARET PUTNAM / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
HOUSTON – For someone inclined to gluttony, Cullen Theater was the
place to be Thursday. Dance Salad Festival 2003 was a feast of talent
from four continents that included dance companies seldom or never seen
in the United States. Ballet dominated, but except for a pointe shoe or
two and Ben Stevenson's lyrical suite from Fountain of Tears for the National
Ballet of China, the style was essentially modern.
Throttled energy surged and waned in Buglisi/Forman Dance's Requiem, set
to Gabriel Faure's music. Five women in extravagant draperies rose and
dropped from their stools, occasionally whipping their dresses. Baroque
formality and grace captured another time. Houston Chronicle April 18,
2003
'Dance Salad' ingredients touch hearts and minds
By MOLLY GLENTZER
Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle
Dance Salad producer Nancy Henderek has outdone herself this year. In
three nights, she's packing in glimpses of as many companies as you're
likely to see at monthlong festivals on the East Coast. Thursday's Wortham
Theater Center opening offered six U.S. and three Houston premieres. Henderek
curates the show like a gallery director, piecing bits of evening-length
works – typically pas de deux – into "new" suites.
This works better with some dances than others if you don't read the program.
The current crop bears her signature preference for stark, unrelenting
modernism. More comic relief might have made me forget the show was three
hours long, but that's like complaining about too many eggs in one's Easter
basket. While there wasn't a thematic thread, it was a big night for limbs.
Quaking hands were like exclamation points in Memphis, Pointless Pastures,
Requiem and Sigue – variously representing frustration, confusion
and anger. There were more than a few intentionally sickled feet, suggesting
vulnerability. But there were also exquisitely pointed and arched feet
punctuating the jaw-dropping extensions of super-human dancers.
There was so much spectacular dancing, it's impossible to pick favorites.
Among the strongest lingering images is the memory of five Buglisi/Foreman
Dance Company figures – stylistic descendants of Martha Graham –
in Jacqulyn Buglisi's Requiem. Poised atop boxes in shafts of gold light
that recalled the dusty, morning-after dawn of New York's Ground Zero,
they moved mostly in stunningly powerful unison. They raised their arms
like a row of mourning Liberties and tested the air below with searching
feet.
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The
Trenton Times
Top-notch dance ‘pardner’ rounded up for youth program
Martha Graham alumnus Donlin Foreman readies for a friendly showdown
at this week’s performance with the Trenton Education Dance Institute.
By Anne Levin
Trenton, NJ Sunday, May 18, 2003
Donlin Foreman never knows what kind of role he’ll be playing when
he appears on stage with children of the National Dance Institute. But
each time founder Jacques d’Amboise calls on him to join the cast,
he’s ready.
“I just do what he tells me,” says Foreman, known in dance
circles as longtime lead dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company and
co-founder, with his wife Jacqulyn Buglisi, of Buglisi/Foreman Dance.
“For almost 10 years, I have done many token adult characters with
NDI. It’s a lot of fun and I’m always happy to do it.”
Thursday, Foreman will join in when the Trenton branch of NDI, known as
TEDI Dance (Trenton Educational Dance Institute), appears in its annual
performance at the War Memorial’s Patriots Theater. “We’ve
Got Mail,” which stars local students, is a free program that will
begin at 7 p.m. (No more tickets were available at press time.)
For Foreman, who is also on the faculty of Barnard College and teaches
at the Julliard School, working with NDI is an opportunity to let loose
and have fun…
“What I always loved about working with him (d’Amboise, the
former New York City Ballet star who founded NDI) is that I could think
in cartoon terms, whereas in Martha’s work I was always doing these
really heavy archetypes like Oedipus and Jason. So here, my imagination
would just fly into the characterish end of it.”
Foreman plans to reprise one of his NDI roles in this week’s performance.
When first asked to appear in NDI in a production called “The Shooting
of Dan McGrew,” he immediately thought of a big cowboy hat he’d
seen.
“I started to work with the makeup,” he recalls. “I
wanted big eyebrows and a big, black mustache and a foam-rubber hat. All
of a sudden I looked into the mirror and it was Yosemite Sam.”
A native of Salt Lake City, Foreman danced at the University of Utah with
Ballet West before coming to New York and joining the Graham Company in
1977. He and Buglisi, who have a teenaged son,
were with the company for 20 years, working closely with the choreographer
for 15 of those years. Graham died in 1991.
“The reason for being there was Martha,” he says. “Jackie
and I both felt we were apprenticed to a master craftsman. So that inspired
us and it keeps us working now when things are rough and tough.”
Notorious for her genius and artistic temperament, Graham was a monumental
personality Foreman feels privileged to have known…
After Graham died, Foreman and Buglisi stayed with the company for a few
years before leaving to form their own company with fellow Graham alumni
Christine Dakin and Terese Capucilli. Buglisi/Foreman Dance has won favorable
notices in New York and on tour.
“The starting point, which we got from Martha, is mainly the gravity
and physicality,” says Foreman, who choreographs a lot of repertory…
Dancers in the company range from 24 to “fiftyish,” says Foreman,
“and all in between. That’s the remarkable thing about it.
It’s very unusual in that way, and it creates a full palate for
the interpretation of these works.
“We have former Graham dancers, but in the past few years have brought
in dancers from other arenas, too, and they are taking over the thrust
of the work now. We will always work with these (Graham) people at different
times, but the thrust of the company now is really the individuals we’ve
trained and worked with.”
These works
and the estate of Martha Graham have been the subject of much recent turmoil…
Foreman is happy to be removed from the fray but pleased to see his former
company back on its feet.
“I’m really glad for them. But you can’t be involved
in a thing like that that is so consuming. I knew all these (Graham) works
like the inside of myself. So my job was to move on and find the inside
of this work I’m doing now, and that’s not so easy.”
“We’ve Got Mail” is something else altogether, a professionally
choreographed performance that gives Trenton school students a chance
to take part in a professional production from start to finish. The objective
is as much to instill a sense of discipline as to provide an artistic
experience.
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THE WORLD OF DANCE
WITH FRANCIS MASON
9 Nov. 2002
The other nights as I watched Ice Theatre of New York at Sky Rink at Chelsea
Piers, I recalled how I used to think dancing on ice is swoopy or jazzy
to soupy or peppy music with acrobatics thrown in. Ice Theatre of New
York kept changing my mind. With ballerina Katherine Healy, who knows
the classics deeply, and David Liu, Nijinsky on ice, they are also focused
on young choreographers like Jacqulyn Buglisi, who's made the finest new
modern dance in the past ten years. Buglisi's given them a contemplation
for a man and a woman about belonging to each other that's based on a
poem by John Donne. Ice Theatre of New York has one more performance,
tonight at 7. Run put on your coat and dash to Sky Rink, Pier 62 at 23rd
Street and the Hudson River. And that's the story on THE WORLD OF DANCE.
This is Francis Mason.
23 Nov. 2002
The program Purchase Dance Corps put on last weekend at Purchase College
was so good I went back to see it again; you could see why important choreographers
want to work with these dancers. Nicolo Fonte, a Purchase graduate who’s
been working in Europe, gave us a wow of a curtain raiser to Benjamin
Britten’s “Simple Symphony.” Fonte knows instinctively
how movement can fulfill and extend good music. I hope he sticks around;
we need that talent everywhere. Sean Curran’s new ballet “The
Saxophone Dances,” a collaboration with American Ballet Theater’s
Studio Company, caught the blues and gave us high notes. In between these
two new works the Purchase Dance Corps gave us Jacqulyn Buglisi’s
“Suspended Women,” a masterpiece about women caught in time,
fulfilled and unfulfilled. And that’s the story on The World of
Dance. This is Francis Mason.
122 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10011 Tel: 212-633-7600
Fax: 212-633-7666 Website: www.wqxr.com
WQXR-FM is The Radio Station of the New York Times |
WOODSTOCK TIMES
October 24, 2002 Vol. 29, No. 43; $1.00
Eloquence without words
Buglisi/Foreman Dance graces Kaatsbaan
Throwing these bodies voice-like through the passions of man and woman,
our movements become to the eyes what words are to the ears.
These lines by Donlin Foreman are from the credo of the prestigious Buglisi/Foreman
Dance Company, founded in 1994 by Jacqulyn Buglisi and Donlin Foreman. The
husband and wife team, who danced together for two decades with Martha Graham,
have been presenting their original choreography for seven seasons in New
York City, most recently at the Joyce Theater. Described as “theatrical
dance,” two superb performances were held this past weekend at Kaatsbaan
International Dance Center in Tivoli, over across the Hudson. For those
who missed them or want to see more, the company will present a different
program at Kaatsbaan on November 2 and 3.
The program I attended included five dance works, four of them choreographed
by Foreman and one by Buglisi. Although the two-hour program, which had
two intermissions, was longer than usual for dance, I savored every moment
of it. My only wish was that I didn’t have to take notes. I didn’t
want to tear my eyes away from the stage. I also didn’t want to try
and verbalize what was being described so eloquently without words. But
that’s my job, and this performance was definitely one of the times
I was grateful to have it.
The absolute highlight of the program was Buglisi’s Requiem, a truly
gorgeous and memorable work that was premiered in New York City just this
year. Exquisite costumes designed by Buglisi and A. Christina Giannini play
an integral role in this piece performed by five women to music by Gabriel
Faure. The dancers wear flowing satin
gowns with drapery emphasizing their hips and long trains. Each gown is
unique, with an emphasis on shades of gold and green. The flowing trains
and drapery become capes towards the end and are then discarded in what
appears to be a gesture of freedom. Throughout this work, the beauty of
the women’s bare backs adds to their statuesque quality. Moving slowly
and deliberately on wooden pedestals, their trains hiding the woods, the
dancers are imbued with goddess-like stature. There is a definite Baroque
painterly quality to this work, orginially inspired by 17th century Italian
painter Artemisia Gentileschi. After 9/11, Buglisi’s Requiem evolved
to reflect this sensitive time.
The first four works on the program were all quite somber and intense. A
romantic pas-de-deux, titled From Pent-Up, Aching Rivers, was danced to
music by Sergei Rachmaninoff and narrated by Clair Bloom reading Walt Whitman’s
poem of the same name. Suite; Arms Around Me was dedicated to friends lost
to AIDS and time. Dancers in this three-part suite wore street clothes,
heightening the reality and relevance of their movements. Martine van Hamel,
who commissioned this work for New Amsterdam Ballet, joined the company
in the third part. Prelude, a solo danced to music by Gerald Finzi, was
the next to last piece in the program.
The mood turned upbeat at the end as the masterful ensemble strutted its
stuff in Mean Ole World. Lisa DeSpain’s jazzy blues score started
out slow and sensuous and picked up speed and steam as it went along. This
highly entertaining work got downright playful towards the end. The audience
cheered its approval during the company’s curtain call. Holding hands,
the ten dancers took their bow by spreading their legs and resting their
heads on each other’s rear ends.
For locals who prefer not to travel into New York to see professional dance
or for weekenders who need a break from the city’s hustle and bustle,
Kaatsbaan is a blessing. Simply driving into the beautiful pastoral facility,
on 153 rural acres, generates a feeling of serenity. The performance space
couldn’t be more ideal – comfortable tiered seating, a dance
floor the size of the Metropolitan Opera House stage, and state of the art
lighting and sound equipment. Tickets are expensive for the Hudson Valley:
$30 for adults, $15 for children. But another performance by Buglisi/Foreman
Dance will be well worth the price of admission. Reservations can be made
by calling 845-757-5106.++
REBECCA DANIELS |
The Chautauquan Daily
August 3, 2001
Crowd Applauds Diamond's New Production
by Mizzette Fuenzalida
(excerpts)
It was an evening of firsts.
…Resident choreographer Mark Diamond's Chautauqua premiere, Ophelia's Lament, received thunderous applause from a standing room only audience. The new choreography presented by Donlin Foreman and Terese Capucilli of A man and a woman sit next to each other… was another outstanding ballet premiere for Chautauqua.
…It was a toss-up between Diamond and Foreman. Both are modern pieces, premieres, and part of larger pieces that will be performed later in the year. It was a joy to be part of ballet history here at Chautauqua.
A man and a woman sit next to each other… was set to the music of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff and his pupil Thomas Alexandrovitch de Hartmann. Donlin Foreman and Terese Capucilli of the Buglisi/Foreman Dance Company were formidable and graceful in their presentation.
A solo piano carried the entire musical portion, which allowed the dancers to be as expressive as they wanted to be. The most electrifying part was the minor sections when they slowed down to a crawl and kept constant physical contact with each other. The continuous touch and twine technique was superb. It was as if we were watching sculpture in motion as their choreography allowed specific visual spacing.
Outstretched arms against a dark background and spot lighting enhanced our visual connection and we began to become part of the dancers.
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