Latest news with #Inger
Korea Herald
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
Explore emotional duality of high-profile choreographer at Asia premiere of double bill
Inger sees bright future for Korean contemporary dance scene Acclaimed Swedish dancer-turned-choreographer Johan Inger says he is impressed with Korea's growing commitment to contemporary dance and sees a bright future for the newly established Seoul Metropolitan Ballet. The 57-year-old artist is in Seoul for the Asia premiere of his double bill, 'Walking Mad' and 'Bliss,' set to run Friday through May 18 at the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts. Following Ohad Naharin's 'Decadance' in March, Inger is the latest high-profile figure in the company's bold lineup for this year. 'In Korea, you're opening new dance companies, and in the West, people are closing (them). I think it's a great initiative and should be really highlighted,' said Inger during a press conference Wednesday in Seoul. Inger, who began his career with the Royal Swedish Ballet before joining the Netherlands Dance Theater under Jiri Kylian, made his choreographic debut with NDT 2 in 1995. He went on to win the prestigious Benois de la Danse award for choreography in 2016. Inger said the two works, created 25 and 10 years ago respectively, are very different. 'I think it's an exciting evening because they show two sides of me as a choreographer,' he said. The evening begins with "Walking Mad," a more theatrical and emotionally charged piece set to Ravel's Bolero. Inger described it as 'a journey into the unknown,' full of humor, drama and human emotion. 'To me, it is a journey of a man going through a world, or a dream, or a state of mind and encountering different personalities but (still) searching. It's a little bit like Orpheus and Eurydice, being pulled back into another place and keep on searching.' The second piece, 'Bliss,' set to Keith Jarrett's Koln Concert, reflects a more stripped-down, introspective side of Inger's choreography. 'I wanted to create something very pure and simple -- just present in the moment,' he said. 'It also represents a time for me, something carefree. I wanted to capture that spirit of the time, in the costumes, in the playfulness and in the improvisation.' For Inger, music is at the heart of every work: He sees it as a partner with which he engages in conversation. He encouraged audiences, especially those unfamiliar with contemporary dance, to approach it as they would music. 'I think dance is very much like music. You hear a piece and have one interpretation of what it means to you, but the person next to you may have a completely different one,' he said. 'So if I have done my work right as a choreographer, it will tap not into the logical parts of your brain, but into the emotional parts.' What continues to drive his work, Inger said, are human beings and human relationships. 'Our strengths, our weaknesses, our ugliness, our beauty -- all the contradictions that make us who we are. That inspires me. I think that's the fuel that keeps me going, that keeps me exploring stories,' he said. hwangdh@
New York Times
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: Can Hubbard Street Dance Chicago Find a New Voice?
The lights go up on two dancers, each isolated in a zone of light. As the two trade moves and trade places, recognizable elements keep recurring: the side-to-side head isolations of Indian dance, a duck walk from vogueing, a hip-hop crotch grab. The ingredients are familiar, but the combination is novel. Such is 'A Duo,' the most exciting of three New York premieres on Hubbard Street Dance Chicago's program at the Joyce Theater this week. Under the leadership of Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell since 2021, the company still seems caught in the international-style conformity that has restricted it in the past. Previous directors had been connected to Nederlands Dance Theater and beholden to its aesthetic. They tended to program the same modish choreographers as seemingly every other repertory troupe. By the evidence of this program, Fisher-Harrell has not rejected that legacy. The bill starts with a work by the ubiquitous Ohad Naharin (the only selection not new in New York) and ends with one by the Nederlands alum Johan Inger. All the way through, what's most entertaining feels slight. But along the way come intimations of something fresh and distinctive. The choreographer of 'A Duo' is Aszure Barton, the company's resident artist. The opening night cast, Shota Miyoshi and Cyrie Topete, performed with sass and flair. What makes the piece work, though, is the music: tracks by the Catalan musician Marina Herlop that mix rhythmic syllables of the Indian Carnatic tradition with her own made-up vocalizations; it's an ersatz sound turned original. Barton's choreography matches every detail in the music with precision, and her own collage of borrowings and personal eccentricities becomes persuasive. The Naharin selection is a vintage one, 'Black Milk' from 1990. It's a primitivist ritual set to the driving yet circling marimba loops of Paul Smadbeck. Five men, shirtless in culottes, mark themselves with a dark, muddy liquid from a bucket, then process in a bouncy march or leap up and out in closely overlapping order. The work has a master choreographer's clarity but not yet a unique voice. 'Into Being,' the wispiest of the premieres, is by Alice Klock and Florian Lochner, a choreographic duo that came together as members of Hubbard Street and now goes by the name Flock. Their style involves non-gendered partnering and cat's cradle formations based on an end-over-end tumbling that can resemble, in blurred approximation, capoeira or contact improvisations. Flock seems to be after a gentle flow, but the result is an energy that doesn't make it through the body and out; everything ends up limp. No such problem troubles Inger's 'Impasse,' a high-energy, crowd-pleasing closer. Inger's scenic design begins with a house outlined in tubes of light. From the house's door emerges Simone Stevens, an ingenuous country girl greeting the day. Two pals join and mirror her in cavorting, but then people of a different sort slink out from the door: confident cool kids dressed in fashionable black. The cool kids, ferociously led by Topete, impose their style and install a smaller house in front of the first. From that house spills a showgirl, a lounge singer, Max from 'Where the Wild Things Are' and a sad-scary clown. All join in on the antics, playing chicken with dancers seated on other dancers' shoulders or everyone doing a pony step together. Inger is clever with trick moves, as when the original three dancers get into a linear loop, two swinging the third by a leg before the third gets back in line to swing the next. Tracks by the Lebanese-French trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf support Inger's escalating structure with another eclectic mix: now Balkan, now Levantine, now Latin. Inger's message, pitting the perils of peer pressure against the power of community, is spelled out all too clearly in a program note as well as acted out onstage. But the self-pleased, knowingly manipulative tone — Topete repeatedly poking her head out of the door and yelling 'Wait!' — is itself an impasse. It kept me at a remove from full enjoyment. Giving their all to Inger's synthetic style, the Hubbard Street dancers look like kids playing dress up, not entirely at home. For a super-skilled company that I hope is growing out of its old conforming ways, that slight disconnect could be a good sign.
USA Today
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Miss Anderson Goes to Washington ... and gives capital a look at Palm Beach chic
Hometown girl Bettina Anderson has always had a pronounced fashion sense. No wonder, that. It's in her DNA. Her mother Inger, a Swedish beauty, is a former model who was a style-setter among the young Palm Beach matrons of the early 1980s.
