The Sokolow Dance Foundation Celebrates the Centennial of Anna Sokolow's Birthday with Yearlong Special Events
SOKOLOW NOW! continues the Sokolow Centennial Celebration with performances at the Massachusetts Dance Festival, August 21st at the Boston Ballet, 19 Clarendon St, Boston, MA. and August 28th at the Fine Arts Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA. The company will present the newly staged trio of compelling female solos, As I Remember. Also paticipating will be Audra Carabetta and Dancers, BoSoma, Boston Dance Company, Contrapose Dance, Kinodance, Lorraine Chapman The Company, Monkeyhouse, Sorvino Dance Project, Prometheus Dance and Static Noyze.
Suellen Haag, managing director for the foundation and Sokolow Now!, will present a modern dance workshop for children August 22 and 29th. Visit the official festival site at www.massdancefestival.org/ and Facebook.
Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh Dance Company presented Rooms on May 1, 2010 at the Dance Place, Washington, DC. This is the fourth reconstruction which the company has commissioned from the Sokolow Dance Foundation. The year, 2010, is also the 55th anniversary of the creation of Rooms. The Washington Post had the following to say about the sold out performance of Rooms:
"Anna Sokolow's 1955 work "Rooms" is not an easy dance to watch. It's intensely dark, and it focuses on isolation, alienation and loneliness. But to see the stark beauty of its steps and to feel the dance's wrenching honesty are rewarding enough to make it satisfying.
Presented Saturday at Dance Place by Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh Dance Company, "Rooms" begins with nine dancers sitting in wooden chairs, staring blankly at the audience. To the sound of an eerie, wistful jazz score, they launch into a series of gestures -- violent slaps on the floor, frantic scurrying feet and breathless collapses of the torso. Though they're moving together, each dancer seems utterly alone. And that tone continues for the rest of the work. When the dancers touch one another, it is mechanical and impersonal, and even the most emotionally charged movements are sterilized to chilling effect by the dancers' empty expressions and seeming aimlessness.
Lorry May, a former Sokolow dancer who reconstructed and staged the work, deserves much of the credit for its effectiveness. She completely reprogrammed these contemporary dancers to capture Sokolow's early modern, Martha Graham-inflected movement style, and yet she gave them the freedom to interpret the steps with their own emotional sensibilities. May's coaching gave "Rooms" the authenticity and intimacy that make it so powerful.
Sarah Halzack100 Years of Sokolow: A Retrospective Concert - The Sokolow Dance Foundation and the Queensborough Community College presented the Retrospective Concert on May 7, 2010 at the college theater on Long Island, New York. Lorry May, Director of the Sokolow Dance Foundation and Emily Berry, Professor at Queensborough Community College, coordinated SOKOLOW NOW! and the QCC dance students in the full-length evening production which incorporated live performance with historical film footage about the life and work of Anna Sokolow. Concert highlights included archival film excerpts of Ms Sokolow dancing Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter.
This special event was the culmination of a two-week residency which included master classes, repertory classes, lecture/demonstrations and studio performances.
SOKOLOW NOW! celebrated Anna Sokolow's Centennial on June 5th at the Boston University Dance Theater, Boston, MA. The retrospective evening highlighted the life of Anna Sokolow through archival video segments. Live performance included As I Remember, three female solos choreographed in the 1930's and 1940's which show the dramatic power for which Sokolow is renown, and the energizing presentation of Session for Six. The company received a standing ovation for their powerful performance of Rooms, Sokolow's masterpiece that set the universal standard for the dramatic fusion of theater and dance.
“Sokolow Now! continued the sojourn with an original choreography of Anna Sokolow called Session for Seven – also combining strength, physicality, and technical excellence – especially during multiple clockwise “T” and forte turns, flying leaps (various sorts) and oozing first position plies; theirs was a performance so sharp that synergy molecules were literally buzzing between dancers, on stage."
Daniel Singh, Artistic Director of Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh Dance Company, began the centennial year of 2010 with a spectacular tour of Bangladesh and a three city tour of India, including Chennai, Bangalore and Ahmedabad. Mr. Singh's company performs Indian classical and contemporary dance, and he chose Anna's Sokolow's Dreams to represent the contemporary genre Dreams was warmly received and highly praised, as this excerpt from the Times of India, January 5,2010 states:
"Devotion. love, togetherness, 'shringara' and sorrow lead to pain through atrocity in the Holocaust or War in the piece de resistance on the second day at InterART.....Projected without words, to expressive music and creative light designs, the images numb,haunt and make you think. "
Suresh D. Desai
Dakshina was the first company to present Anna Sokolow's work in South Asia, and this being the centennial year is most fortuitous. Kudos to Dakshina/ Daniel Phoenix Singh Company for creating this extraordinary initiative between two such diverse cultures.
