CriticalDance Forum

There is a small company in Barcelona with classical language, the only one of this kind, created by David Campos and his wife Irene Sabas former dancers in the Royal Ballet of Flanders (Belgium):

http://www.balletdc.com/3gener33ingles.htm

they have two ballets combining Heavy Metal (Metallica & Apocalyptica) and tutus, and I have to say that they have been great successes in Barcelona and have had a recognition also in the Edinburgh festival 4 or 5 years ago.

The aim of "Rock Requiem" was only to investigate in the possibilities of such combination and the result is a piece of great visual impact.

“La mascara de la muerte roja” (The red dead mask) has a plot based in an Edgar Allan Poe terror tale.

Hey, great topic, I'm Alissa Cardone -- a dancer/choreographer from Boston..

I've been working in Boston with a rock musician, the guitarist Chris Brokaw - formerly of Codein, Come, Brokeback, and a number of other music acts associated with the indie-rock scene (he toured with Evan Dando of the Lemonheads for a while). The few times we've performed I've found that audiences, especially non-dance audiences or people with little prior exposure to contemporary dance really love the mix of rock and dance.. I think it gives them a way into the dancing.

It's been really really interesting to transfer ideas about improvisation and its principles of "listening" to Chris - who is used to tight song structures. There is a real rawness about rock that meshes with my aesthetic and energetic goals in making dance so finding a process to catch the essence of a conversation between his guitar sound and style and my dance is really cool. If anyone out there reads this and has some experience in this area, structures that they can share, I'd love to hear about it.

There's a company, Magpie, in Europe that works with the punk band the Ex, they work primarily with improv. I'm dying to see their work.

http://www.magpiemusicdance.com/

They are located in Amsterdam and have worked with the Ex but also with a lot of other musicians who work with improvisation.

greetings and enjoy the website

OKGO the indie rock band's video for their Million Ways. has the band doing modern dance in the backyard. It's exquisite.

They also now do it as their encore when on tour.

I did a "historical recreation" of the dance for one of my shows last fall to great sucess.

It seems, that modern dance can't make a dime for itself, but can make rock bands a million dollars....

http://boss.streamos.com/qtime/capi001/ ... s_v750.mov (link for quicktime, high speed connection)

or go to http://www.okgo.net/video.asp and pick your own resolution...

My Chemical Romance has contemporary ballet in their video 'Helena.' They dance to the funeral of a beautiful young lady, who comes back to life for about thirty seconds to dance down the aisle in a GORGEOUS black and red dress.

Helena's performance was a bit lacking in technical skill--I put some of it down to dancing in a very cramped, narrow aisle. Her skirt was almost touching the sides when she did her slow turns! Poor girl!

Besides, I was absolutely BEDAZZLED by the corps. The women leap! Their partners catch them! They are all wearing BLACK!

IT IS AWESOME!!

http://mychemicalromance.com/flashsite.php

Go to 'Media', and click on Helena. You can watch it with the sound off if you don't like that sort of music. It's that good!

I'd like to see more ballets to rock music. This is a great way to re-package ballet for a new audience... I once saw a hip hop on pointe at the Luckman Center in LA - it was great! I'm all for it. And a lot of rock musicians use orchestral music in their music. I've heard quite a bit...

Ballet and rock music are mutually incompatible. The latter degrades the basic qualities of the former.

I'd partly disagree with you there. From what ballet I've seen, there appear to be two types: your traditional classical ballet where everyone is smiling and everything is extremely graceful, and the more modern ballet, where the movements, while still ballet, are stronger, and the sets and costumes are not what you would expect in a traditional ballet. David Bintley's 'Carmina Burana' for the Birmingham Royal Ballet comes to mind here.
For the first type of ballet then I agree that rock music would not be appropriate at all, but for the second type I believe that it could work. Using 'Carmina Burana' as an example again, the themes and ideas brought up in the work could easily be put to rock music, and while Carl Orff's well known score is technically classical music, to me it has the volume and emotion of many a rock tune.

I do like it very much Ballet with Rock Music, the contrast is amazing and it calls new audiences to ballet, this is definetively true as I have seen it many times.

Roland Petit’s ballet with Pink Floyd's music is the one that comes to my mind and Nacho Duato’s Coming Together with music of Frederic Rzewski (Coming Together) is a great experience on that too.

Also as I mentioned before the mixing of Pointe ballet with Heavy Metal (Metallica & Apocalyptica) brings an excellent new approach to ballet technique.

I do not find any kind of ballet degradation on that

raedyn_l : Carmen Corella is not my hero but I like her very much