Thursday March 17, 2011 - In the continuing series of $5.00 classes being offered by The Playground at Manhattan Movement and Arts Center, dancer and choreographer Emery LeCrone gave a two-hour session today with a nice group of dancers taking part, including some familiar faces like Erin Arbuckle, Natalie Axton, Loni Landon, Jaqi Medlock and Christopher Adams.
Emery gave a smooth warm-up exercise, 'awakening' the limbs and getting the breathing activated, then extending to crunches and pushups. In a quick-stepping motif, the dancers moved across the floor.
From there she went right into making a phrase. This passage was developed with several components: determined pacing forward with quirky hand gestures, swooping into broader movements and dropping to the floor, recovering and surging onward. It took several repeats for the dancers to get all of this into their muscles. The somewhat ominous music (Thunderstorm) was nearly impossible to count and Emery urged the dancers to rely on feeling rather metronomic pacing. Soon it was looking fine, with individual dancers bringing something unique to it.
After working on this phrase and a second passage in smaller groups, Emery asked the dancers to pair off and gave them a quasi-improvisational task: to create a brief duet in which one dancer leads and the other follows, with energy flowing back and forth.
The dancers (Jaqi Medlock and her partner Juan Acosta, above) came up with some really nice moves...
...and Emery had each couple show what they'd created separately. I kind of wished there was another 1/2 hour of time so these small duets could have been developed further.
Here are a few more of my very amateur photos from today's class:
Christopher Adams
Jaqi and Juan; their improv was so nice to watch.
Emery will be creating a new work for the Columbia Ballet Collaborative's performances at the Miller Theater on April 9th and 10th. And she's currently dancing at the Met in Tchaikovsky's QUEEN OF SPADES.
Manhattan Movement and Arts Center is such a lively center for dance; it's always wonderful to see people I know and love there, like Gregory Dolbashian, Deborah Wingert, Francois Perron and Lourdes Lopez, who's running MORPHOSES auditions there this week. More about that tomorrow.
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