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Article Excerpt
Fang-Yi Sheu Taking Up the Mantle fo Martha
"Go at your audience with a whip," Louis Horst used to tell Martha Graham. When the Martha Graham Dance Company came to City Center last April, its second New York season since winning back the rights to its own repertory, the whip was in one body: Fang-Yi Sheu. Even her name bites and slices. Small and dark, Sheu studied Graham technique with Ross Parkes in her native Taiwan and joined the Graham company in 1995. At City Center she took up the mantle of Graham and danced with scathing grandeur. In Herodiade, she gave us undecision burnished like a blade. In Errand Into the Maze, her concentration was like compressed coal (remember, she's underground with the Minotaur). Nerve-jangled rhythms sheathed in smooth muscle, Sheu's dotted walk along the rope was primal power. She shows you the true monster: her mind, the anxiety spiral she's fighting. "I beleieve you must have a demonic technique," wrote Graham in Blood Memory. Hail Sheu, demon wings, www.marthagrahamdance.org--LAURA JACOBS
Danny Tidwell swift Mastery
At the premiere of Robert Hill's Dorian for American Ballet Theatre last year, one dancer soared above the rest. When Danny Tidwell leapt towards the arc lights and hung in the air for a long, surreal moment, the gasps in the audience were audible. * Tidwell, a 20-year-old corps member, has sculpted, elegant proportions and a kinetic ease that bely his late start in ballet. At 15, he won a scholarship to the Universal Ballet Academy. By 2002, he'd earned a silver at the USA International Ballet Competition in Jackson [see DM, October, 2004, page 53] and entered ABT's Studio Company. * ABT's male roster is famously deep, but Tidwell stands out nonetheless. "Danny has innate timing," says Hill. "He's capable of changing the texture of his physical attack, which allows him to make extreme dynamic shifts." Tidwell knows his strengths--and goals. "Jumps and turns aren't hard; artistry is," he says. "To create a whole new world for the audience, that's the fantasy of ballet." www.abt.org--HANNA RUBIN
Avichai Scher Young and Prolific
Twenty years old, and he's created more than 20 ballets. At 16, Avichai Scher, then an SAB student, created his first work for the school's Student Choreography Workshop. "I loved it, and the ideas kept coming. I'd work with dancers even when there were no production opportunities," he says. Since then, ABT Studio Company, Miami City Ballet School, Washington Ballet, and Sacramento Ballet, among others, have danced his pieces. * For San Francisco Ballet School, Passing Fancies revealed sophistication in concept, structure, and musicality. SFB artistic director Helgi Tomasson says, "How someone moves people around in space, how they create structure, is telling. I sensed a hunger-this is what he wants." * Scher(pictured with Erena Ishii), now a corps dancer with Ballet San Jose Silicon Valley, wonders how he'll manage to choreograph along with dancing professionally--but he knows he doesn't want to wait. He'll be 21 soon-time for another ballet? www.balletsanjose.org--CHERYL OSSOLA
Uri Sands Choreography for the Gods
Uri Sands may be Charlotte's sexiest man (according to Creative Loafing Charlotte), but in Minneapolis, he's a dance deity. Last summer the choreographer debuted a new project, Space T.U. Embrace, in which he powered through a solo with an athletic blend of African, ballet, modern, symbolic, and ritualistic moves, before being joined by 15 multiracial dancers in a performance of generosity, grace, and primal power. A former dancer with Alvin Alley American Dance Theater and Minnesota Dance Theatre, Sands commutes between his gig as principal dancer with North Carolina Dance Theater and his home in St. Paul, where he lives with his dance collaborator and wife, Toni Pierce-Sands (also a former Alley dancer), and their son. Space T.U. Embrace is the pilot project of the couple's still unnamed company, and their dancers, practicing a diversity of styles from ballet to bharata natyam, exemplify the cultural richness of the Twin...
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