Texas Dance Theatre CAST PARTY AT THE OMNI HOTEL 10 p.m. - 2 a.m.

Texas Dance Theatre- Season Finale TONIGHT! 8 p.m. Scott Theatre- Tickets at Box Office-PERFORMANCE CAST PARTY AT THE OMNI HOTEL 10 p.m. - 2 a.m. (Houston and 12th St, Whiskey & Rye Restaurant) cash & carry only -- drink specials & live band!!! Come meet the dancers!

Texas Dance Theatre Season Finale

Friday, April 30 at 8 p.m. Scott Theatre- 1300 Gendy St. Fort Worth, TX 76107. Featuring "Adam and Eve and God", a new work created for TDT by New York choreographer Mark Panzarino, former dancer with Miami City Ballet; and "Duet" by guest choreographer Elizabeth Gillaspy, Associate Professor of Ballet in the School for Classical and Contemporary Dance at TCU in Fort Worth, Texas.

Also: Premieres by TDT Artistic Director Wil McKnight and Resident Choreographer Krista Jennings Langford, and works by TDT Ballet Mistress Emily Hunter.

General Admission: $25

For Tickets:
www.texasdancetheatre.com

Guest Choreographers Mark Panzarino and Elizabeth Gillaspy set works for Texas Dance Theatre Season Finale; April 30- Scott Theatre 8 p.m.

Mark Panzarino began his studies at the age of 6 with Nina Youshkevich, protégé of Bronislava Nijinska. His education continued at the School of American Ballet, the Joffrey Ballet School, San Francisco Ballet School, and at the David Howard Dance Center, before joining Miami City Ballet in 1990.
Favorite featured and soloist roles performed include Balanchine's
Allegro Brillante, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, A Midsummer Night's Dream,
Jewels (Emeralds), Scotch Symphony, and Tarantella; Petipa's Don Quixote (Wedding Pas), The Nutcracker, The Sleeping Beauty; and Litvinov's Cinderella.
Mark has performed, choreographed, and taught for Broadway Dance Center, Dance Theatre of Harlem, the American Ballet Russe, Metropolitan Repertory Ballet, InMotion Dance Company, the Renaissance Dance Ensemble, and Tampa Bay City Ballet. He is an adjunct at Eugene Lang College/The New School.
His most ambitious ballet to date, Fugue of the Mermaids, was presented at Steps on Broadway in April 2009 as part of their choreographic lab. A monthly cable-access dance-industry talk show with Mark as co-host is in pre-production. Adam and Eve and God: a dance for two, will be presented in January 2010 by Texas Dance Theatre.
Additional notable projects include his sculptural work of mixed media, Touchdown, featured prominently in the lobby of the Times Square Hotel, a building listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A book of short poems was published in 2002. Mark is completing his first novel.
His ballet coach and life mentor is Peter Schabel. Mark lives in Manhattan with his completely spoiled 12-year-old dog, Zoey.



Born in Italy to opera singer parents, Elizabeth Gillaspy began creating dances at five years old – in her kitchen and living room. Since then, her works have been performed nationally and internationally, from Texas to Taiwan. She had the honor of creating two ballets for the late Fernando Bujones’ Orlando Ballet, and her work, A Gift, for Ishihara Ballet of Kure, Japan, appeared on the Dance Gala Hiroshima 2007. She has choreographed for finalists in New York’s Youth American Grand Prix and more recently premiered a solo, Lorelei, at the Alvin Ailey Citigroup Theater in New York, danced by former New York City Ballet dancer, Michele Gifford. Critics have noted her work as “poetic and real” and “skillfully structured”. Most recently she has founded her own project-based company, Nymbal – new ballet, dedicated to showcasing contemporary ballet choreography. She is an Associate Professor of Ballet in the School for Classical and Contemporary Dance at TCU in Fort Worth, Texas, where she resides with her husband, Randy.

Texas Dance Theatre Offers Open Company Classes

Texas Dance Theatre is offering open company classes on Tuesday and Thursday evenings at 7 p.m., and on Saturdays at 12 noon. $15 per class. Location: Fort Worth Community Arts Center's Scott Theatre (Garber Hall Studio) 1300 Gendy St. Fort Worth, TX 76107. 817-676-1514. email: wil@texasdancetheatre.com

Moody Moves

Moody Moves
Texas Dance Theatre makes a strong showing in its second performance of the season. Margaret Putnam reviews.
by Margaret Putnam
Published Saturday, November 14, 2009

Apparently, no one told Wil McKnight that creating a new dance company is a risky business. But that he did, and his newly sprung Texas Dance Theatre made a credible appearance Friday night at Fort Worth's Scott Theatre.

It was the second of the four programs scheduled for its 2009-'10 season, and gave us a taste of where the company is headed. Semi-classical ballet dominated, either of the moody, dreamy variety, or the astringent. This time it added a dollop of jazz.


The dreamy came in Emily Hunter's Dreamers, set to the moody music of Ryuichi Sakamoto, and featured Hunter in simple gray dress and a shirtless Brandon Addicks in gray pants. The subtle interplay between the couple involved their keeping separate distances, but always aware of the other, followed by lifts where Addicks revolves Hunter in slow, lush arches. The support was mutual, with Addicks leaning on Hunter’s back as she carefully lifts him and just as carefully brings him to the floor.

Mel Tomlinson (of Dance Theater of Harlem, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and New York City Ballet fame) capitalized on nine women adept on pointe and a single masculine Dan Westfield. Slight hints of Balanchine’s influence surfaced occasionally in A Notte, mainly in the simplicity of structure, the taste for a bare stage and black leotards and tights. But Mr. Tomlinson had his own fish to fry. At the center were a stunning Lauren Collier and Westfield, flanked from time to time by twos, threes and fours. When the couple are alone, they mirror each others movements with curving arms and gentle sways. In one arresting sequence, they lie flat with backs to the audience, and lift legs upward to form a sharp diamond.

The mood throughout is sober and intense, whether it is the graceful revolving lifts, rows of women stepping purposely forward and back, or the ending, where Collier rolls to the back, curled up in sleep, and Westfield follows.

Except for erratic lighting and a certain tentativeness on the ensemble’s part, the fact that A Notte was put together in just two days says something about the caliber of dance.

The program ended on a giddy note with Krista Jennings Langford’s Lift Your Spirits. Set to the lively music of Esquivel, Joe Bucci Trio, Nat King Cole and Ray Charles, three women in black party dress and three in white frolic in a party mood, managing to have fun without men. And then Westfield shows up, sitting on a stool, reading the newspaper. Every once in a while he glimpse at the women, distracted by their antics, gives a frown, and goes back to reading. The women, however, aren’t about to give up, and in turn, either vamp, slink, saunter bravely to touching distance, and shyly skitter away. Westfield had the least to do, but his looks of alarm, annoyance, perplexity, and indifference liven up what was a party with no direction.

A 50-minute pile-up on Interstate 35 prevented me from seeing Mr. McKnight’s opening work, New World, set to the music of Philip Glass and Yo-Yo Ma.

The program will be repeated at Richardson's Eisemann Center on Sunday.

►Margaret Putnam has been writing about dance since 1980, with works published in D Magazine, The Dallas Observer, The Dallas Times Herald, The Dallas Morning News, The New York Times, Playbill, Stagebill and Dance Magazine.

Hunter's Dreamers

Former NYCB Soloist Mel Tomlinson Creates New Work for Texas Dance Theatre

Mel Tomlinson stages his A Notte a work created for Texas Dance Theatre to be premiered at Scott Theatre on November 13, 2009.

Born one of six siblings in Raleigh, North Carolina, Mel Tomlinson became interested in dance after studying high school gymnastics. When he was 17, he began formal dance study at the North Carolina School of the Arts. Tomlinson received his B.F.A. degree in only two years, while he also toured as a principal dancer in Agnes De Mille's Heritage Dance Theatre and switched from a modern dance concentration to ballet. In 1974 he moved to New York to join the Dance Theater of Harlem (DTH), where his powerful build, crystalline articulation of line, and supple flexibility propelled him to soloist, most notably as the snake in Arthur Mitchell's "Manifestations" (1975). In 1976 he took a leave of absence to perform with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, where he took over the male role in Ailey's "Pas de Duke" with Judith Jamison and premiered the revival of Lar Lubovitch's "The Time Before the Time After" ("After the Time Before") with Sara Yarborough. Discouraged by the heavy touring responsibilities of the Ailey company, Tomlinson returned to the DTH in 1978 to perform principal roles in "Swan Lake" and "Scheherazade" .

In 1981 he joined the New York City Ballet as its only African-American member. He was quickly promoted to the rank of soloist, and his performance in George Balanchine's "Agon" was called "dynamic and electric" by the NEW YORK TIMES. Tomlinson left that company in 1987 to join the faculty at the North Carolina School of Arts. In 1991 he joined the Boston Ballet as a dancer and master teacher in the CITYDANCE program, bringing classical dance to public school children in the Boston area.

'Prayer' makes dramatic season opener for Texas Dance Theatre

Dance review: 'Prayer' makes dramatic season opener for Texas Dance Theatre

03:06 PM CDT on Saturday, September 26, 2009

By MANUEL MENDOZA / Special Contributor

FORT WORTH — Bruce Wood’s elegant new dance, A Prayer for Mary Catherine, was the highlight of Texas Dance Theatre’s season-opening performance Friday at Scott Theatre.

Prayer is the first piece created by the Fort Worth choreographer since he closed down his world-class company three years ago. It began with ballet mistress Emily Hunter en pointe, shuffling upstage with her back to the audience. Hunter and the other female dancers wore gauzy white gowns as they executed Wood’s mingling of traditional ballet vocabulary and inventive modern movement.

The first section featured an inward-outward dichotomy. Hunter would fold into herself like a woman in distress, then suddenly burst open her body as if she had found some relief. The 10-minute piece ended as dramatically as it began, with Hunter again facing away while another dancer flitted across the stage under fading light.

Artistic director Wil McKnight has assembled a crack company of classically trained dancers who showed crisp technique throughout the night’s four pieces, even the less successful ones.

Penny Askew’s Vigil failed to build emotional momentum despite the mournful Rachmaninoff music and the black smocks worn by Hunter, Lauren Collier, Josie Baldree and Julie DuBois. Props rarely work in dance, and the umbrellas carried by the dancers limited their movement. Occasionally an arresting moment emerged, as when the four women echoed one another in a beautifully timed series of staggered pirouettes.

Like Vigil and Prayer, McKnight’s Eight Lines was performed en pointe. McKnight, a veteran dancer new to choreography, showed a command of ballet language and an eye for taking advantage of his dancers’ skills. Dressed in simple red slip-dresses, Collier, DuBois, Hunter and Rebecca McManus appeared to defy gravity as they bounced on their toes to circular Steve Reich music.

Hunter’s Marimba x 4 was the evening’s most dissimilar dance and as inventive as Wood’s. The dancers wore black body suits while enacting a playful ritual of leg slaps and hip and shoulder sways while giving one another the thumbs up.