Author: Kathleen Wessel

Last weekend, Dance Canvas celebrated its fifth-anniversary season with “Introducing the Next Generation,” a showcase of works by emerging local choreographers. A key component of the organization’s mission, said founder and Artistic Director Angela Harris, is mentorship in both the artistic and business aspects of professional dance. Dance Canvas puts out a call, chooses promising choreographers…

“The Nutcracker” is, well … a tough nut to crack. Since its debut more than 100 years ago, the venerable ballet has been restaged and re-imagined by countless dance companies all over the world. It even has a TV reality show, “Battle of the Nutcrackers,” which pits famous versions of the piece against one another in…

Almost 30 minutes after French hip-hop choreographer Pierre Rigal’s “Standards” was scheduled to begin on Sunday, audience members continued to pour into the Rialto Center for the Arts. The box office, it seemed, was caught unprepared, and Rialto Director Leslie Gordon confirmed this when she apologized for the delay and announced that the show was sold…

Driving down West Trinity Place in downtown Decatur, one might zip right by the Beacon Hill Arts Center without even noticing it. But among members of the metro Atlanta dance community, the squat, nondescript brick complex has long been a haven, even a beacon, for practicing artists, choreographers and performers. At the end of this…

Once in a while the stars align and a wacky idea — something conceptually fascinating but logistically near impossible – actually comes to fruition. And for many artists, whose big plans are often at odds with scant resources, the fulfillment of a grand ambition is the Holy Grail. That is what “Threshold” means to Atlanta-based…

One by one, the men stormed onstage with fists clenched and jaws tight, planted themselves in front of folding chairs and roared at the audience before sitting down to assume postures of surprisingly awkward mock anger. My heart sank. Here was masculinity — the subject of scrutiny in this year’s showcase by the all-male dance…

Tracy Lang, who goes by the more succinct T. Lang, is a self-proclaimed Chicago-born New Yorker turned Atlantan. She moved here in 2008 to accept a job in the Department of Drama and Dance at Spelman College, bringing with her a unique style of dance movement she calls “urban contemporary” as well as her then two-year-old company,…

In rehearsal for her new work “Prayer of Touch,” New York-based choreographer Helen Pickett watches intently as Atlanta Ballet veteran Tara Lee darts across the studio, her tiny, muscular body just barely glistening with sweat as she performs a complicated, lightning-quick movement sequence. Later they will be colleagues: Pickett is sharing a triple bill with the…

Choreographer and Atlanta native Juel D. Lane wants to say thank you to the city that shaped him and to the friends who have supported him along the way. And, while such sentiments might sound like those of someone with many years of hard-won experience, Lane, who has choreographed professionally in Atlanta only since 2009 and recently premiered a…