Getting to Know Jonathan Lee

Often referred to as "Sunday Funday" by the staff, Sundays at Steps on Broadway are a little less busy and a lot more laid back than weekdays. One of the highlights of the day is Jonathan Lee's 2:00 Beginning Hip-Hop Class which is always overflowing with dancers and non-dancers alike, fun and cutting edge choreography and a contagious energy.
Danielle Thibault, a student and hip-hop instructor at Impulse Dance Center in Natick, MA agreed to talk to Jonathan about his career as a performer, choreographer and teacher.

DT: What attracts you to hip hop more than styles such as ballet or modern?
JL: What attracts me to hip hop is the music. I love all different styles of dance but hip hop gives me the freedom to express myself more freely.

DT: Out of all the things you've done, such as working with famous performers, being in commercials, theater productions, taking class, and teaching -- which is your favorite and why?
JL: I love performing out of all the things that I do, whether it be in front of the camera or on stage. It's like breathing I can't live without it!!

DT: What was it like to work with people such as Britney Spears and Madonna? JL: I enjoyed working with Britney and Madonna. I was so blessed to work with such huge pop stars.

DT: Who has been your biggest inspiration in life and why?
JL: My biggest inspiration is my faith in God. Through good and bad, He has always kept me grounded.

DT: When did you start dancing?
JL: I started dancing when I was able to walk but I started taking class when I was 8 years old. =-D

DT: When teaching a class, what is your goal for the students entering?
JL: When I teach, I want my students to have a good time. Even though they may not get every step the first time I want them to feel and know that they eventually will.

DT: Have you always known that you wanted to dance? If so, did you always see yourself doing hip hop?
JL: I didn't know that I always wanted to dance but I knew I always wanted to entertain. I enjoyed being the ham. Hip hop and dance in general has really catapulted that into a reality.

DT: How did taking other styles of dance influence your choreography in your hip hop classes?
JL: I feel other dance styles have made me a better and stronger dancer, choreographer, and teacher. Nowadays, there is so much fusion going on that you have to well versed in all disciplines.

DT: What do you find the hardest part of teaching? And what is the best part?
JL: The hardest part of teaching is being patient with myself and my students. I tell my students if they are patient with themselves I am patient with them as well. The best part is being able to share my craft with people and hoping that after taking class they walk away feeling inspired and better about themselves.

DT: Did you go to college for dance?
JL: I did not go to college for dance but I did go to school for music.

DT: Who are some of your favorite choreographers?
JL: One choreographer that I have to give it up to is Mr.Wiggles, who is one of my mentors. I like Tabitha and Napoleon, Alvin Ailey, Bob Fosse, and Jerome Robbins. There are so many. People have so much to offer.

Catching Up with Peter Carpenter (part 1)

Peter Carpenter and Donnell Williams rehearsing My Fellow Americans

Photo by Cheryl Mann.  

By karen Krolak

If you happen to be in Chicago this fall, please live vicariously for me. October is just jammed with fabulous dance performances by artists I adore. Be sure to start the month of at Peter Carpenter's My Fellow Americans.

Peter Carpenter fuses political activism with intensely physical poetry. Images from his earliest works, such as When I Say I'm Queer Does It Frighten You?, still leave me breathless almost two decades later.  His raw masterpieces appeal to audience members all along the ideological spectrum. I have known die hard Republicans who followed his work even if they did not agree with his ideas.

His latest creation explores "the shifting identity of Ronald Reagan from the perspectives of the "special interest groups" that his rhetoric and policies consistently admonished," according to his facebook invite.  Please go see it and let me know what you think. Oh, and check back on Friday to read my email interview with Pete.

 

My Fellow Americans

Thursday & Friday performances: October 8, 9, 15, & 16 at 7:30pm 

Hamlin Park Studio Theater

3035 N. Hoyne, Chicago, IL 60618 (map)

$15 general admission/$10 student or low income

Buy Tickets online directly at brownpapertickets.com

Choreography: Peter Carpenter
Performers: Peter Carpenter, Lisa Gonzales, Suzy Grant, Atalee Judy and Donnell Williams.

Dance Sneaks into the Fuller Craft Museum (part 2)

by Karen Krolak

While some of the pieces in the Perfect Fit at the Fuller Craft Museum reference dance directly, others simply reminded me of specific Monkeyhouse pieces. For instance, Marjorie Schick's Chopines and Puddles, 2008 pictured at the right (Photo: Gary Pollmiller), would be right at home in the futuristic setting of Odalisque/What's Next. These puddle jumpers practically beg for someone to investigate their movement potential.

In fact, when Monkeyhouse premiered at the 2000 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, we had to build something similar but far less elegant. I had blown out my ACL a few weeks before the festival and could not manage to dance on our usual drywall stilts. Thank goodness Amelia was able to craft a suitable alternative for us. (On a related note: Nicole should share the rather humorous story about how those stilts altered her professional debut in that concert.)

After glancing around Marjorie's website,  I am fascinated by her unusual wearable art extravaganzas. Hmmm...I wonder if she would ever be interested in designing some costumes...

 

Dance Sneaks into the Fuller Craft Museum (part 1)

by Karen Krolak

I love when I stumble onto dance themes in surprising places. Meandering down to Brockton to see The Perfect Fit - Shoes Tell Stories at the Fuller Craft Museum, for instance, I was not expecting echoes of tap classes or beeswax enveloped ballet slippers. 

I caught my first whiff of dance's influence on this exhibit as I passed by Judy Haberl's Baby Opera. While I was staring at the assortment of 416 bronzed baby shoes that resembled miniature masks, a recording of someone delicately flapping, shuffling, and tapping reverberated through the hall. 

Continuing on my backwards journey through the exhibit,  I discovered Jennifer Carroll's Dancerexia. Jennifer is a professional choreographer and teacher who has trained at the American Ballet Theater School, Joffrey, Louis-Nikolais Dance Lab, and  Pilobolus. Her visual art explorations began by altering her collection of used dance shoes. "Some are perfect as they are: worn, torn, even bloody. Others I have taken the liberty of transforming." she explains on her website. In Dancerexia she revamped one of her own black pointe shoes and replaced the slipper's toe box with a scale that registers 100 pounds. 

oops...must run to a meeting but there will be more on this soon.

Break Out Your Tap Shoes!

by Nicole Harris

Have your tap shoes been gathering dust in the closet? Are you looking for a way to celebrate this last week of August? (I know, I'm in shock too. What happened to the summer?) Well, have I got the solution for you! I will be teaching tap at Steps on Broadway (2121 Broadway (at 74th St) New York City) this week! I'll be teaching Int Tap on Thursday, August 27th from 4:30-6:00 and Adv Beg Tap on Friday, August 28th from 6:15-745, so come on out and join the fun!

I hope to see you there!

Rachel Maddow's Pillow Talk

by Karen Krolak

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I curled up in the roots of a great tree and heard Suzanne Carbonneau interview Rachel Maddow at Jacob's Pillow a few weeks ago. Afterwards, though, I kicked myself because I was too absorbed in listening to take intelligible notes. However, a few days later Debra Cash, one of Boston's most established dance writers, sent out some quotes from this talk on the Dance Action Network. Thanks to Mariclare Hulbert from the Pillow's Press office for transcribing Rachel's thoughts, granting permission to reprint these ideas, and sharing these photos with us. 

 "I know nothing about dance. I am a fan. I am a fan of dance and  of Jacob's Pillow and a fan of people who know nothing about dance." - Rachel Maddow

"Sometimes we choose to serve our country in uniform, in war. Sometimes in elected office. And those are the ways of serving our country that I think we are trained to easily call heroic. Its also a service to your country, I think, to teach poetry in the prisons, to be an incredibly dedicated student of dance, to fight for funding music and arts education in the schools. A country without an expectation of minimal artistic literacy, without a basic structure by which the artists among us can be awakened and given the choic

e of following their talents and a way to get to be great at what they do, is a country that is not actually as a great as it could be. And a country without the capacity to nurture artistic greatness is not being a great country. It is a service to our country, and sometimes it is heroic service to our country, to fight for the United States of America to have the capacity to nurture artistic greatness." - Rachel Maddow

"Not just in wartime but especially in wartime, and not just in hard economic times but especially in hard economic times, the arts get dismissed as sissy. Dance gets dismissed as craft, creativity gets dismissed as inessential, to the detriment of our country. And so when we fight for dance, when we buy art that is made by living American artists, when we say that even when you cut education to the bone, you do not cut arts and music education, because arts and music education IS bone, it is structural, is it essential; you are, in [Jacobs Pillow founder] Ted Shawn's words, you are preserving the way of life that we are supposedly fighting for and its worth being proud of." - Rachel Maddow

NEA Grantee of the Day - Dance Theater Workshop

(Part of an ongoing series that demonstrates how some of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Direct Grantees have influenced Monkeyhouse's growth.)

By Karen Krolak
Dance Theater Workshop/New York, NY/$50,000 - Dance Theater Workshop (DTW) invited me to participate in two amazing workshops in the Spring of 2004. Each week, I would truck down to New York on Thursday afternoon just in time for a Writing on Dance class with Wendy Perron, Editor of Dance Magazine. Having studied with her at Jacob's Pillow's International Improvisation Workshop in 1992, I was delighted to recognize parallels between her creative processes in writing and dancing. Her exercises and critiques pushed me to develop a more active approach to describing dance.

This course vastly improved Monkeyhouse's outreach materials and press releases. Whenever Monkeyhouse's supporters compliment us on the quality of our blog posts or enews articles, DTW and Wendy deserve a huge chunk of that praise.

Friday mornings, I would return to DTW for the Bessie Schönberg Laboratory in Composition led by Patricia Hoffbauer. I have lost touch with most of the other choreographers from this group but I still keep tabs on Kiyoko Kashiwagi. Kiyoko was building a whip smart, anime inspired version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Using her jazz sneakers as pointe slippers and manipulating her cleverly designed costume, she would seamlessly transform from a ninja to mad scientist to token love interest. Her splashes of silent film slapstick accented her effortlessly elegant ballet technique. It was deliriously fun to witness this piece's evolution.

Since I was grappling with my first case of choreographer's block, I loved getting regular feedback on my work as it was struggling to take shape. Patricia's advice shook me out of this period of stagnation. There aren't many instructors who would be so willing to continue chatting about choreography after a three hour class but Patricia was always willing to go out for coffee with me. Though my choreographic sketches from this Lab did not develop into a full piece, I have stolen phrases and images from it for Doattee and Pelargic.

I won't lie; some of those 8 hour round trip jaunts to the Big Apple were beastly. Boston, however, does not have resources like this for emerging artists. So if I have not said it enough, thanks DTW for creating these opportunities and for sharing them with an out-of-state member.