By the fourth time the rows of fifth graders were exhorted to raise their voices, they were psyched. “Roooooaaaaaaarhhhh,” they again shouted. This time it worked. The community had spoken; bullying muscle-bound storm god Anzu was routed; the huluppu tree was liberated!

You actually could leave the kids home and still thoroughly enjoy Inanna and the Huluppu Tree. Combining music, dance, aerial acrobatics and theater, the piece was created by Miami Theater Center (MTC)’s founder, Stephanie Ansin and artistic collaborator, Fernando Calzadilla. Based on ancient Sumerian myths, and featuring original music by Luciano Stazzone with choreography by Octavio Campos and aerial choreography by Lleigh Reynolds, it is presented at the MTC in Miami Shores.

If yours are not among the busloads of South Florida schoolchildren lining up for weekday morning performances, bring them to a Saturday evening show. A well-produced study guide serves as a crib sheet to the unfamiliar names and the story line, while also giving props to Sumerian innovations: the wheel, writing, irrigation, arithmetic, the hover-craft. (Not really, but Inanna’s brother Utu’s nimble horseless chariot is slick.)

Actually, the play’s strongest take-away lies in its moral messages, rather than historical lessons. These are first intoned by Great Grandmother Earth, Goddess Ninhursag (Shaneeka Harrell), in a resounding invocation to the play’s principals, her offspring. And more injunctions percolate up during the course of a drama that is delivered in a flowing sequence of short songs, performed with varying degrees of finesse; a wide-ranging musical backdrop; and dances created by Campos in an appealing diversity of fanciful styles — Middle Eastern-ish.

As the play opens, three masked acolytes peer through a richly painted scrim and nervously ask, “Where is he? Where is he?” A restive crowd in the ancient city of Uruk impatiently awaits the coronation of a new king, Prince Gilgamesh (Rico Reid), son of the late king. But he is AWOL, and the play’s namesake character, Inanna (vivacious Diana Garle) — goddess of love, war, fertility, plus a few other divine attributes — is desperate. She has descended with haunting luminosity from heaven to crown Gilgamesh, and he is a no-show. What’s a goddess to do? Stage a diversion.

Enter the huluppu tree. Uprooted and washed adrift in a river of the Urukians’ tears (grieving their king’s death), this sapling was rescued by Inanna, and, after a three-generation divine family dust-up, she plants it next to the temple to serve as a time-marker for the arrival of a new king. Thus, we have our diversion.

But in drama, as in life, plans go awry. Replete with golden fruit and elegantly crafted in graceful wooden arcs and poles, the huluppu tree stands commandingly center stage. It grows thicker and denser before our eyes. An attractive nuisance, however, it soon hosts an unwelcome encampment of three lively new deities (the Sumerians had thousands of them), two of whom flap, roar, swoop and somersault in the air: Luckner Bruno’s thunder-cracking Anzu and acrobatic goddess of merriment and laughter, Siduri (Ana Mendez). They are lifted and propelled with skill and strength by unseen stagehands. (Tip of the hat to Cirque du Soleil, Crouching Tiger and MTC technical director, Ron Burns.)

These oversize characters, each with a distinctive trick bag, neglect official duties to instead cavort, vie for position and devour the tasty huluppu fruit (a few of which they toss into the audience). Among these three freeloaders, the “pharmacist” Ningizzida, (Troy Davidson) eloquently exploits his jokester role and his signature props: a roulette wheel of maladies and herbal remedies and a multi-pocketed cloak of herbs. Inanna is stymied by these loafing lodgers, but then Prince Gilgamesh, the would-be king, returns from his pilgrimage and is put to the test: Can he turn out the freeloaders and restore order to the kingdom? Can Inanna keep him on track, avoiding violence? Will the audience repeatedly surge to his aid? (Does Superman wear a cape?)

Some of the larger-than-life characters are effectively amped-up with computer-enhanced voices and, in the case of Anzu, by that glorious steroidal body armor, enormous wings and yellow-feathered legs. Subtleties of staging and delivery are interwoven amid broader styles of engagement with an indulgent and mostly guileless audience, reared on The Lion King, Star Wars and Xbox. The assembly eagerly embraces this combination of old and new stylings.

In the music, sound design, choreography and deep, richly layered set, we inhabit an ambiguous milieu, but when did you last encounter “authentic” Sumerian music or dance? A combination of live percussion (musicians perched in a Mondrian-like scaffolding within a luminous cathedral of modulated blue light) and commissioned music evocative of such diverse sources as John Williams’ extra-terrestrial scores, early rap and Putamayo’s Arabic Groove carries us through tonal moods that complement the drama. Never outright campy, the playwrights, director, choreographer and actors give an occasional wink to avoid sanctimoniousness, even as they preach that old time religion.

Confession one: My wife and I have no children. Confession two: We cheered with the best of them. You will too.

May 1 – June 2, 2013 at the Miami Theater Center, 9806 N.E. 2nd Ave., Miami Shores; at 10:00 a.m. Tuesdays through Fridays; 7:00 p.m. Saturdays; cost is $20; 305-751-9550; www.mtcmiami.org.

The Coral Gables Congregational Church’s Community Arts Program All-Star Jazz Ensemble is one of the 15 finalists, and one of only four community ensembles, in the 2013 Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington Competition & Festival, taking place from May 10 to 12.  

The sound of “Echoes of Harlem” is unmistakably Ellington’s, without over-simplifications or apologies, regal and swinging — even if played in tank tops and flip-flops.

It’s just another rehearsal for the Coral Gables Congregational Church’s Community Arts Program All-Star Jazz Ensemble, but it’s a special one. There are just a handful of Thursday evenings left before the band plays in the finals of the 2013 Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington Competition & Festival in New York City.

Of the 15 finalists, South Florida will be represented by three ensembles: The Dillard Center for the Arts, Ft. Lauderdale;  the New World School of the Arts, Miami, and this All-Star Jazz Ensemble, one of only four community bands chosen nationwide.

“This is awesome,” says Daniel Sagastume, 17, the band’s baritone sax and a student at Coral Reef High School. “I never really thought I would have the possibility of something like this. This is something special.”

Daniel Strange, the director of the Ensemble, says that when they found out that had reached the finals “we were overjoyed.”

“We rehearse just one night a week, two and half hours and this is the Superbowl of high school jazz band competitions,” says Strange, also an adjunct professor at University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. “For us to be one of the finalists it’s huge. These guys will never forget this experience.”

The event includes not only the competition, but also workshops, jam sessions, and other activities. As an added incentive, the three top finalists will get to perform with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, as guest soloist. Already trumpeter Marcus Printup, drummer Ali Jackson, and trombonist Elliot Mason, current members of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, have visited Coral Gables to work with the band.

The All-Star Jazz Ensemble started with only 13 members, not enough for a big band, in 2009. According to CGCC literature, the Ensemble experience was “designed to sharpen sight reading, style, technique, improv, rhythm, recording studio skill, college prep and career development through the practical study and performance of jazz repertoire that spans the standards to newly-composed works.”

It was perhaps the most visible piece of an ambitious, evolving  program.

While the CGCC has had a Summer Concert Series since 1985, it instituted its Community Arts Program in 2002 with the arrival of Mark Hart, executive and artistic director. That same year, the church established the Conservatory for the Arts, an after-school program with the purpose to “make music education accessible to all kids,” explains Hart. “So even if they have financial difficulties, we make it possible for them to have a teacher and learn music. Our Saturday program is based on a sliding scale depending on what a parent can afford, it can go from full scale pay to nothing.”

The program includes several ensembles — including the Junior and Intermediate Orchestras, the Advance Chamber Ensemble, a Jazz Prep Band and the All-Star Ensemble — and its own recording label, CAP Records.

“When I started we had seven kids on a Tuesday evening,” recalls Hart. “Right now we have close to 125 kids in the program.”

Students must audition for the All-Star Jazz Ensemble, explains Strange, the director, “and we get the best players of each school. We’ve had good quality players from New World, Gulliver, Ransom Everglades, Coral Gables, Coral Reef, Felix Varela …. What’s interesting is that this is the best band we’ve ever had, yet this year we don’t have any players from the top fine arts schools.”

Sagastume, the bari sax player who next year will be attending New England Conservatory in Boston, didn’t have any experience in playing a large jazz ensemble.

“When I joined I had just got into high school and I wasn’t part of the band in my school,” he says. “We didn’t have a real jazz band, so when I got in here it was awesome. It’s been the best experience. We play such good literature. We play great classics from the Count Basie band or Glenn Miller. You don’t get this kind of exposure in a high school band because you get lower level [arrangements] Here we are playing the real deal.”

The Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ is located at 3010 De Soto Boulevard, (across from the Biltmore Hotel,  Coral Gables. For more information call 305-448-7421, ext. 120 or check CommunityArtsProgram.org.

The Miami City Ballet Company (MCB) will close its 2012-2013 season this weekend at the Arsht Center with Broadway and Ballet, a valentine to Jerome Robbins and George Balanchine. No surprise there, since the MCB has been acclaimed far and wide for its devotion to the masters, especially Balanchine. What makes this program so delicious is the unpredictable pairing of the works as well as the works themselves.

The first part of the performance belongs to Jerome Robbins. So successful was he as a choreographer of Broadway musicals — “West-Side Story,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “The King and I” are only a sampling of his handiwork — that it is easy to forget that Robbins loved ballet as well. And ballet as pure as it gets: that’s what his “Dances at a Gathering” is all about.

Originally created by Robbins in 1969 and set to the piano music of Chopin, it marked his return to more classical forms, most particularly pas de deux. The ballet has no props, and hardly any set. Five couples came together in no less than 18 movements, nearly all of them waltzes and Slavic mazurkas. This “Gathering,” in the hands of the rotating cast of MCB, which includes Jeanette and Patricia Delgado as well as Rene Penteado, is a nearly encyclopedic examination of flirtation. One may as often sigh at its sheer beauty of a piece as laugh aloud at its wit. There are the twists that Robbins was so fond of: a gesture at odds with the lyricism of a movement that manages to zap up its impact. And there are the times when flirtation becomes surrender. Look out then.

If the evening begins with elegance and a delight in non-narrative movement not ordinarily associated with Jerome Robbins, the evening ends with bawdiness and very nearly a funk not ordinarily associated with Balanchine. His ballet, “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” was originally a play within a play, part of a Rodgers and Hart Broadway hit, “On Your Toes” from the 1930s. Several decades later Balanchine dusted off his work and expanded it into a stand-alone ballet filled with ladies of easy virtue, silly coppers, sly gangsters and a very deadly competition between two male dancers centering far more on their skill as dancers than any issues of romantic attachment. The real question seems to be, can a great classical dancer become a great hoofer if circumstances demand.

Yep. Especially with a little help from one’s friends, or in this case one Phillip Neil, tap-dancer, former New York City Ballet principal and current South Florida resident. Suddenly — that is after a bit of tutelage — several MCB members  including the great Yann Trividic, become the irrepressible hoofers and jazzistas   “Slaughter” demands. Patricia Delgado, dancing in very high heels, plays the love interest in a climax that could wake the dead.

If all this weren’t enough, on Friday night, the part of gangster gunman will be played by retired Major League Baseball catcher extraordinaire, Mike Piazza. He promises no errors.

Miami City Ballet’s Program IV Broadway and Ballet, Friday and Saturday at 8:00 p.m., Sunday at 2:00 p.m. at the Ziff Ballet Opera House, the Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300  Biscayne Blvd., Miami; tickets range from $20 to $175; www.arshtcenter.org.

This review also appears in Miami New Times.

Photo: Daniel Azoulay

Probably the most predominate need for any choreographer is to find a place to play, create, investigate, but even more important, a place to show their work. From the Works in Progress Series in New York’s Dance Space, or The Shared Choreographer’s Showcase in Cambridge, Mass.’s Dance Complex, or our hometown Open Space series presented by Dance Now Miami at The Little Haiti Cultural Arts Center, studios and more established companies offer a vehicle for other artists to present their work in a lightly produced or bare-bones affair.

One company helping to support other artists is Sobers & Godley, founded in 2009 by Simone Sobers and Gierre Godley to present original contemporary works. In the summer of 2012, the duo founded and produced Dance Soirée in New York City. The mission was to provide an accessible platform for emerging artists to present their work in a raw setting for written feedback from an audience. One choreographer based on audience votes receives an Audience Choice Award honorarium. Showcases take place in the winter, summer, and fall in New York City. And this past weekend, on Sat., April 27, the project’s inaugural spring showcase took place in Miami at the Miami Dance Studio.

Twelve artists, nine local and three from New York, answered the call for work to be presented in this venue. It was standing-room-only, with audience members watching from the back and sides. The magic was the intimate proximity of the artists to the audience, where every nuance and bead of sweat is exposed by two floor stage lamps shining a light against a white wall background. Every piece had the same set up; that one common denominator required that the artists stand out on the merits of their work.

Some were more successful than others.

There were a series of solos which, either by coincidence or design, were all costumed in white, and all seemed to blend into each other. The difficulty of presenting solo work is that unless you have the fortitude and commanding presence of Judith Jameson performing Ailey’s “Cry,” solo work can feel uncomfortably indulgent or overly introspective, trading movement for a highly gesticulated vocabulary. A stand out by merit of its folkloric theme and the dancer’s own enchantment was the ritualistic performance of “Espiritu Shanti,” by Kamaria Dailey.

Highlights of the showcase included Southern Breakdown, a trio by Brigette Cormier, danced by Cormier and two others, dressed in striking red dresses.  The women danced in individual vignettes that moved craftily in and out of unison movement and brought the dancers back to their own starting poses. The movement itself was captivating, but the musical choice of Train Song by Avocado State was distracting. The vocabulary and the interpretation of the space was strong enough that the piece could have worked equally well, if not even more impressively, in silence.

“Consumer,” a spoken word and movement collaboration by writer and spoken word artist Marie Whitman and dancer Paola Escobar, was an intelligent performance piece, where both word and movement reflected and informed each other well. While Escobar danced in, on, and over a rocking chair, Whitman would circle and manipulate the chair while sharing her thoughts on the perils of consumerism. Both women had great presence and Whitman has the rare talent of delivering her engaging words effortlessly, without a hint of hesitation or recitation.

“Beauty of a Woman,” choreographed by Alexandra Makarova, was performed by a quartet of women of varying ages from a young girl to the mature and vibrant Makarova. The piece was a lovely and mesmerizing fusion of contemporary and flamenco. The women danced in canon with the flourishing of fans in hand as they accented the syncopations and rhythms in the soft flamenco guitar music. The movement was rich and flowing but also very physical and challenging.

Also promising was Chad Austin and Shawna Bowden’s quartet, “A Woman’s Story,” whose second section was the strongest danced by four women to a cover of Nina Simone’s often times misunderstood song, Four Women; and Ferdinand de Jesus’ “Bitter Earth,” a duet performed by a powerful couple to Max Richter’s mix of a Dinah Washington standard.  Both pieces had elements that on the surface mildly imitated themes, devices and design of already established works by artists like Ulysses Dove, Talley Beaty, or Alvin Ailey. But at their core was a strong intensity and delivery that as the artists’ future works develop, can grow to an even more powerful original voice.

Even with the diversity of styles mentioned so far, there were two pieces that unfortunately felt out of place. “Fun on a Foggy Day” was a tolerable, decently sung, half jazz dance/half musical number with requisite jazz hands. And “Down on the Pharm” was an overly long costume piece that was heavy on metaphor and light on the tap.

Finally, the bookends of the night were an untitled opening duet by presenters Sobers & Godley that was physical, visceral, and predatory, as the two used the back wall as an extension of their bodies and as the edge of the abyss. The closing piece was Sobers’ creation, danced by the aforementioned Makarova and Claudia Alvarado. The piece titled “About Your Nothing” was a wonderfully dense and at times harrowing pool of movement, with barely a rest for the two strong performers. Whereas many artists confuse emotionally heavy dance interpretation as craft, this work proves that vocabulary, true movement of bodies in space, and genuine craft are more successful at provoking emotions with subtext.

One thing that could benefit the overall experience is curating a smaller number of presenters to eight to 10 (their were 12 works by invited artists and the presenters’ two works). In a showcase of so many styles and artists, reducing the number of works and the length of the showcase would give the audience a better chance to more deeply appreciate each course and rest the palate in between. The selection process would also benefit the program by having a more defined scope. But overall, Miami dance will be better served if such a series continues.

Photo credit: Samantha Siegel

In a single weekend, we will be able to see two of this country’s reputable dance companies, both selecting ballets made in the United States and in a variety of American styles, in one Broward setting.

The Broward Center for the Performing Arts is offering a ticket deal — $99 to see both companies on two separate days. And, like many things American, each of the five ballets delivers a distinctive taste, influenced by a worldly palette. The red hot contemporary Trey McIntyre Project (TMP) will perform three of McIntyre’s ballets, flavored by traditional Basque dancing, Shakespeare and more, Friday and Saturday at the Center’s Amaturo Theater. South Florida’s Miami City Ballet (MCB) will present repertory of George Balanchine, founder of the New York City Ballet (NYCB), and Jerome Robbins, best known for his Broadway choreography, Friday through Sunday at the Au-Rene Theater.

Local dance-goers might already have plans to see MCB, which conducts four programs plus The Nutcracker annually at the Broward Center (it will be in Miami at the Arsht Center May 3 through 5). They might also be familiar with the 10-member TMP, who performed there last year, led by the much sought-after choreographer McIntyre, who has created dances for ballet companies from Moscow to Santiago, New York to Chicago. Seeing both in one weekend, a viewer can observe how choreographers working in the United States have made different soups from the same stock — the stock, in this case, being classical ballet vocabulary.

Dancer Elizabeth Keller embodies many of dance’s histories and experimentations. Born in Dubai to Pittsburgh-native parents, she trained in London at the Royal Academy of Dance and in Houston and Philadelphia. Dancing with MCB for 10 seasons under founder Edward Villella, formerly a leading dancer at NYCB, she absorbed the speed, clarity and precision of Balanchine technique. Earlier, in Pennsylvania, she fell in love with Balanchine’s choreography by working on it with the French ballerina Violette Verdy, Villella’s colleague and one of Keller’s mentors. Keller remembers Verdy describing the circular movement rond de jamb in this appealing way: “Stir, stir the chocolate  fondu. It’s gooey.” A striking movement, frappé, was “sharp, sharp like cheddar cheese.”

Now in her first season with TMP, Keller challenges her ballet-trained body with new tasks. McIntyre’s rigorous choreography includes not only pointe work, but also weighty, grounded movement. Dancers are sometimes called upon to rotate their legs externally, as in ballet, but Keller now must also engage other parts of the body to work in a parallel stance. Additionally, Keller says, McIntyre “encourages us to be present and almost, in a way, vulnerable,” both in the studio and on stage. In rehearsal for Queen of the Goths (2007), loosely based on Titus Andronicus, McIntyre pushed Keller to investigate each moment and detail of choreography — “It has to mean something, it has to cost you something,” she recalls him saying about a series of gestures by her character, Tamora, who unwittingly eats a meat pie made from the remains of two of her slain sons.

MCB’s offering of Balanchine’s burlesque Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (1968), based on the 1936 musical On Your Toes, tells a lighter story. And Robbins’ elegant Dances at a Gathering (1969) depicts human relationships through the physical expression of Chopin’s music. Keller says that, like Robbins, McIntyre encourages his dancers to engage with one another on stage, drawing the audience into their world and stirring their imaginations.

McIntyre’s Pass, Away, commissioned by the Broward Center and premiering this weekend, and Arrantza (2010), join Queen of the Goths on the TMP program.

This is the deal: for $99, you choose one night in an orchestra seat to see TMP, at 7:30 p.m. on Friday or Saturday; one night day or night to see MCB, on Friday at 8:00 p.m., or Saturday and Sunday at either 2:00 or 8:00 p.m. The Broward Center for the Performing Arts, 201 S.W. Fifth Ave., Ft. Lauderdale; for tickets call 954-462-0222.

Photo: MCB’s “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue”; photo: Daniel Azoulay

This also appears with Miami New Times.

At its 1853 premiere in Venice, Giuseppe Verdi’s beloved opera La Traviata was jeered. That may have been the fault of the singers, as the composer hinted in a letter to a friend. Since Verdi’s time, lush orchestrations, a string of aria hits, and a libretto about a libertine courtesan who finds love and dies have made La Traviata the most performed opera in the world. Indeed, the need to make such a familiar production fresh has lead to many outlandish and sometimes even absurd productions.

Not so with Florida Grand Opera’s 2013 season closer. FGO plays La Traviata straight – and the singers would have made Verdi proud.

On April 20, María Alejandres was indisputably the best leading lady of the season, and one the best Violettas I’ve ever heard. Her voice projected powerfully, with a flawless technique and colorful musicality. It was deliciously decadent to hear Sempre libera, Violetta’s first act tour de force sung, not shrieked.

Ivan Magrì held his own as Alfredo, with a youthful lyric tenor in complete control and balancing neatly with Alejandres throughout. However, it took a couple of acts for dramatic chemistry to flare between the two, in the duet Parigi, o cara. It was worth the wait.

Giorgio Coaduro made a fine Germont, with a convincing paternal presence and vocal command. Although it took him a little while to warm up, he did so in time for a heartfelt Di Provenza il Mar, il Suol.

The cast as a whole seemed disconnected from each other in the first acts, finally coming together as an ensemble in Act III. Bliss Heberts’ staging did not help. It seemed static, perhaps because Allen Charles Klein’s majestic sets did not leave much room for anything or anybody else. This posed a particular challenge for the dancers in the Gypsy and Picador chorus. Fortunately, choreographer Rosa Mercedes made the most of the limited space.

Maestro Ramon Tebar brought out the best in the orchestra, taking a Bel Canto approach that highlighted the influence that style had on Verdi’s work. The contrast in tempi between the pathetic opening prelude and the adjacent party scene, and the unusually fast Brindisi were refreshing jolts.

Energized, the audience responded to FGO’s production of La Traviata with a standing ovation that lasted almost as long as the courtesan’s drawn-out death.

India Jazz Suites: The Fastest Feet in Rhythm pretty much spells out what will be going down Saturday at the South-Miami Dade Cultural Arts Center. The event is a high-speed hybrid of ancient Indian moves and contemporary tap, created by Kathak dance master Pandit Chitresh Das and celebrated tap dancer Jason Samuels Smith.

Many dancers talk of the energy in their work, but few understand it in the way Das does. The 69-year-old dancer’s pursuit of the sublime doesn’t stop with his deep devotion to Kathak, a classical Northern Indian dance form. He likes to mix things up, juxtaposing the rhythmic structures of his own tradition with others, opening up to improvisation, or as he calls it, a “conversation” between traditions.

Das’ partner in that conversation began his career at age 15 as understudy for Savion Glover in the Broadway production of Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk. Samuels Smith went on to win an American Choreography Award for a televised tribute to Gregory Hines, and founded Los Angeles’ first tap dance festival in 2003. He has tapped his way across prominent stages from London to Chicago, and has appeared as a guest performer on So You Think You Can Dance.

Das’ interest in other traditions began with a ritual fire ceremony six decades ago, marking the start of his training with guru Pandit Ram Narayan Misra, who was more interested in his student’s integrity than his dance technique. In the 18 years they worked together, Misra taught Das the two most important lines within Kathak dance: the sensuality of the Lucknow school and the fierce rhythm of the Jaipur school.

Das’ parents were celebrated dancers in the classical tradition. “It seemed there was never an end to the dancing at home,” he says. “It went on all day and all night. Much of it might have been considered ‘subversive,’ pro-Indian independence reworking of classical works.”

His parents’ dance school was among the most celebrated in Calcutta (now Kolkata), and their son was something of a prodigy. Das’ first public performance was with sitar genius Ravi Shankar.

“I grew up in a golden time,” Das says, referring to his apprenticeship as well as the promise of India in the 1950s. But by the 1970s, fewer Indians seemed interested in their own culture. “One needs to go out of one’s country to understand it,” his mother told him. And so, like so many other young people at the time, Das set out for Berkeley, Calif.

“Everything was going on, some of it wondrous,” he says. “Still, I was isolated from my own roots, my own environment, and when that happens, one recreates one’s own environment.”

Since then, he has recreated that environment all over the world. Today Das has dance schools in Kolkata, Mumbai, San Francisco, Boston and Toronto. He performed at Lincoln Center in New York in 1988 and has been featured in documentaries on PBS and the BBC. He also offers classes to the children of sex workers in Mumbai’s Red Light district and gives workshops at the Blind Opera of Kolkata.

His intention is to honor the instructions of his guru: “To live and to dance as though the [dancers’ ankle] bells, the students, the audience and even a stray chair have all become one.”

In India Jazz Suites, add Samuel Smith’s tapping feet to the sound of those bells. And, Das says, just as when particles collide, “what the audience will be witnessing is energy.”

This appeared in the Miami Herald, 4/16/13

The MDC Live Arts series closes its 2012-13 season with the Brooklyn-based bassist and Argentinean bandleader Pablo Aslan and his quintet performing Piazzolla in Brooklyn this Saturday, April 20, at The Colony Theatre. Aslan’s work from his 2011 recording and follow-up to his Latin Grammy and Grammy-nominated Tango Grill, continues a tradition in fusion of jazz and tango first explored by Astor Piazzolla, tango composer and bandonéon virtuoso, the father of nuevo tango in the 1950s.

After World War II both jazz and tango moved out of the dance halls and ballrooms and into the popular clubs and concert halls, both becoming music to listen to with a much more diminished role for dancing. What saxophonist Charlie Parker and the other early beboppers were doing for jazz, Argentinean Piazzolla was doing for tango.

Piazzolla, while living in New York, was looking for commercial success in the United States, which led to his jazz/tango work Take Me Dancing, recorded in 1959. His nuevo tango introduced sax and electric guitar to tango, mixed electric and acoustic instruments, and fused harmonic and melodic structures.

Miami Herald, JazzTimes and Artburst contributor and critic Fernando González wrote in his 2013 Grammy-nominated liner notes for Piazzolla in Brooklyn that “the Piazzolla of Take Me Dancing was a musician desperately juggling artistic ambitions and subsistence needs. He was back in New York City, where he had spent most of his childhood, but now with a wife and two kids, and looking for a fresh new start for a sputtering career.

“The pearl of this work was supposed to be Take Me Dancing, a recording of both originals and jazz standards interpreted by his Jazz Tango Quintet, comprising electric guitar, vibes, piano, and bass, plus small percussion.”

The recording was anything but a commercial success, and as González recalls, even Piazzolla remarked how dreadful it was. However, his ideas about jazz-tango served to inspire Aslan to reevaluate the work and give it an open-minded listen. A master himself in the fusion of the languages of jazz and tango for the last 20 years, Aslan revisited Piazzolla’s pieces with the sensibility of jazz.

In his interview with González, Aslan says of Take Me Dancing that “the themes and the ideas were very strong and original, but some of them just went by too fast. I felt there were many places where the music could be opened up and developed further. That was the Eureka moment, when I realized that the material in this record had a potential that just needed to be unleashed.” González further says that the arrangements by Piazzolla for nine of those original 1959 pieces became the “road map” for Aslan’s Piazzolla in Brooklyn. Besides having the earlier work as a guide, one important element that Aslan had that Piazzolla didn’t was “an ensemble of musically bilingual players as knowledgeable and comfortable with the vocabulary, syntax, and rhythms of tango as they are with jazz.”

Piazzolla in Brooklyn should not be confused for a tribute album or a remake. Instead it is the culmination of an ongoing conversation between jazz and tango, over 50 years in the making.

As part of MDC Live Arts’ commitment to create meaningful educational experiences, two classes will be offered for MDC students, geared towards providing a musical and historical framework to this fusion of jazz and tango. In the first class, González leads a multimedia, curated listening session that will explore the music of Piazzolla within the history and evolution of tango. The second class is a live music clinic led by Aslan for NWSA music students that traces the innovations and techniques that popularized tango and jazz in the Americas. Both events offer students a unique opportunity to draw connections across cultures, nations, generations, and genres.

MDC Live presents Pablo Aslan Quintet on Sat., April 20 at 8:00 p.m., the Colony Theatre, 1040 Lincoln Rd.,, Miami Beach. Tickets are $25 for general public and $10 for MDC students; 305 237-3010; www.mdclivearts.org.

Space and sound are closely related, even if it often goes unnoticed. Over the course of two weeks, many of the performances at the Subtropics Festival in Miami Beach confronted this relationship.

Paula Matthusen, a former Miami resident, spent hours recording sounds in New York City’s historic engineered underground, including Old Croton Aqueduct, which was used in the 19th century to deliver water to the city. Her surround-sound composition prominently featured the acoustic hallmarks of water dripping in caves, even incorporating sounds of a tour guide at one point. But particularly striking were the shifts to a new space. The sonic difference between an underground tunnel and the outdoors is significant, and without a visual aid, the listener is struck by the contrast.

At one moment, we abruptly moved from the watery echo of the aqueduct to silence. The background sounds disappeared, replaced by a loud, violent metallic sound, like a hammer striking a metal pipe. In a soundscape composition, these are the equivalents of themes and melodies, and indeed Matthusen described her piece as a “theme and variations.”

Water was also prevalent in Dafna Naphtali’s performance. Naphtali is a New-York based vocalist who uses computer processing to significantly alter her voice during performance. In one piece called “Dripsodisiac,” she made sounds with her voice that recalled dripping water. The computer then took those sounds, repeated them, and spun them around the speakers that surrounded the audience, creating a wet, sonic space that falls somewhere between a natural environment and a digital one.

Ron Kuivila performed a piece from his laptop that incorporated dial tones, ring tones, and FAX machine sounds from different countries, combining them with actual analog telephones stationed around the room, the sort you will remember if you were alive in the 1970s. The dial tones and the ringing telephones with their bell gave a nostalgic quality to the piece, a reminder that sounds can go extinct like wild animals. Now we can hear them in a gallery, but how much longer will they be found in their natural habitat?

These performances took place at Audiotheque, a studio in the ArtCenter South Florida building at 924 Lincoln Rd. Gustavo Matamoros, the sound artist and director of Subtropics, has turned it into a performance space that seats around 40 people, surrounded by speakers. The intimate atmosphere complements the music, allowing the electronics to stay at a comfortable volume while still conveying subtle nuances. And the audience feels at home, enough to ask a lot of questions after the performance.

The festival included several performances at other locations, including Matamoros’s trio Frozen Music at the Miami Beach Botanical Gardens, also featuring David Dunn and Rene Barge. On a beautiful sunny day, children climbed around the many nooks of the garden, and speakers surrounding the open grassy lawn produced an urban collage of sounds. Chief among the mix was a six-hour recording of Dunn’s electronic automaton, which produces a never-repeating, chaos-driven stream of beeps and hums and bloops, sort of like Finnegan’s Wake performed by an Atari.

The sounds were reminiscent of mockingbirds, and much like Natali’s water drips, they produced a curious effect that sounded both natural and synthetic at the same time. The same can be said of the Botanical Gardens, a beautiful space that achieves much of its beauty through human manipulation of nature, and that can’t entirely escape the rumble of busses and traffic on the surrounding streets.

In a different context, these same sounds can kill. In a lecture the day before, Dunn had described his fascinating work recording the communicative sounds of bark beetles — a parasite that is devastating hardwood forests across North America. Before Dunn, no one realized how chatty the beetles were, as the sounds are very quiet and can only be picked up by special microphones embedded in the tree. Working with biologists, Dunn developed his electronic automaton in part to kill the beetles. By piping the sound into a tree, the beetles become disoriented, uncommunicative, and unable to reproduce.

The Subtropics festival will return in two years, and while at times it may be challenging and provocative, it will absolutely not affect your reproductive abilities.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to catch more music and sound art along these lines, check out Phill Niblock’s piece Aomoni Water playing at the 24/7 outdoor Listening Gallery (underneath the awning) at 800 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach. On Sat., April 20, you can check out The Treble Girls at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden, 2000 Convention Ctr. Dr., Miami Beach ,at 5:00 p.m. –  a mother-daughter duo featuring flute, violin, voice, and electronics. Part of the 12 Nights of Electronic Music and Art, a production of The Feta Foundation; 12nights.org; $7.

Image: Dafna Naphtali

The lovely weather down here these days, the vibrant cultural scene, the ethnically diverse food options, all those are reasons that have Alison Chase jumping for joy. It is pretty cold, by the way, in Maine, where she lives.

But more important than all that: the modern dance giant — she co-founded, oh, some little groups you may have heard of, like Pilobolus and Momix — is thrilled to be in South Florida this week to hold the world premiere of her work Red Weather, at the South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center (SMDCAC) on Saturday.

Red Weather is part of a four-piece show that Chase’s touring program, Alison Chase Performance (from her dance theater production company, Apogee Arts), will be performing in our area, where she and her dancers have also been sharing with the community by way of workshops.

“I am doing a whole week of outreach here, and one workshop was very exciting because it involved kids from the area and a senior citizens group, and so we did a transgenerational workshop,” says Chase from the SMDCAC facilities. “I am looking forward to working with local choreographers and dancers… I would like to come down and just do research, with the music and the restaurants. This is a really rich, wonderful, community here.”

The opportunity to teach in South Florida is a welcomed one for the choreographer, professor and 67-year-old mother of three who brought a highly kinetic style to dance, adding film, aerial performances (expect that in her South Miami-Dade show), and multidimensional storytelling to create a signature style.

“We don’t have such a dynamically diverse community,” continues Chase about how South Florida differs from her region. “We enjoy teaching people the process of invention, and encourage them to blend whatever kind of dance they do, whether it’s merengue or salsa, to approach it playfully, and to expand that vocabulary out.”

And expanding the vocabulary of dance is what St. Louis-born-and-raised Alison Chase has been doing most notably since October 1971 when, along with several colleagues at Darmouth College, what would become one of the world’s best known and most important contemporary dance companies, Pilobolus Dance Theater, took its first steps.

Chase’s life with Pilobolus abruptly and stunningly came to an end, however, in December 2005. Reports surfaced that Chase had been fired due to differences with the company’s board of directors, who wanted her to sign over ownership of her innovative works.

She refused.

Pilobolus, meanwhile, disputed her version of ownership rights in the media.

When asked about this episode today, Chase responds that she can’t comment on it. “Well, I have moved beyond. I have signed a gag order,” she says. “I am delighted to be doing what I’m doing.”

After the Pilobolus chapter, the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1980), among many other awards, free-lanced, until she officially founded Apogee Arts in 2010.

“I realized that I passionately enjoy making dances, and if I had an ensemble that I could sort of be free to direct into new choreographic adventures, and teach them, I felt there would be great freedom in a small organization that’s not trapped by such a heavy, heaving touring schedule,” she explains. “And I’ve enjoyed doing it with a pacing and a phrasing that I can control and that it’s not overwhelmingly frenetic. I like to work slow.”

Slow, however, is definitely not an adjective to describe her work.

Alison Chase Performance at SMDCAC, 10950 SW 211 Street, Cutler Bay, Saturday, April 13, at 8:00 p.m. Tickets range from $10 to $35 (a select number of $5 Cultureshockmiami.com tickets are available for ages 13-22); www.smdcac.org; 786-573-5300; www.cultureshockmiami.com.

This article also appears with Miami New Times.