Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk star in new season at the Joyce
by Mary Staub
Encore Magazine
http://www.encoremag.com/?q=article&id=394
Savion Glover is perhaps best known for his tap work on Broadway. After all, he made his Broadway debut at age ten, in The Tap Dance Kid, and won two Obie Awards for his Broadway show Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk about a decade later.
But Savion Glover’s dedication to tap reaches far beyond the flashiness of Broadway shows. It began when he was just seven years old and would take weekend trips to New York City for tap lessons. Around that same time, Glover caught glimpses of such legendary tappers as Chuck Green and was immediately taken. It was the notion of tap as music, more so than dance, that captivated and continues to fascinate Glover. And it is this, the sound of tap, rather than only its look, that he’s most passionate about.
“I was introduced to tap as its being music,” Glover says in a phone interview. “People like Chuck Green and Jimmy Slyde were great musicians because of their approach to tap. In the style of tap I do, tap is the leading instrument and I like to make audiences aware of that.”
This is the central theme of Glover’s multi-week season at the Joyce Theater this month. Although tap is usually associated with jazz or Broadway music, Glover decided many years ago that tap can flavor any musical style. For his current production, Savion Glover’s Solo in Time, tap and flamenco will come together.
“The connection of what I do to flamenco lies in the whole lament, whole cry, whole pouring back into the earth and giving energy back to the earth,” says Glover. “It’s a cry and a celebration. That’s what music, sound, vibration should do. It should spark energy in someone.”
For audiences wanting a narrative performance with the glitz and glamour of a Broadway show, Glover’s Joyce production may not be the ticket. Just like in most Joyce shows, in Savion Glover’s Solo in Time, narration is clearly beside the point. It’s a concert; not purely or primarily a dance concert, but a concert of sound and rhythm.
“One of the great things about a concert-style project is that it’s not Broadway and there isn’t a thematic thread throughout the evening,” says Glover. “The only story here is tap. Tap is music. Tap is song. It’s free expression, emotional expression, and I hope it allows the audience to be moved by what is on stage.”
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company
GaGa technique of strength and restraint featured in BAM run
Encore Magazine
http://www.encoremag.com/?q=article&id=396
by Mary Staub
Countless methodologies maintain they will bring on a healthier, more natural, effortless way of moving. The Feldenkrais Method, Alexander Technique, Body-Mind Centering, and Ideokinesis are just a few that come to mind. Most of these encourage practitioners to become aware of their own existent movement patterns by focusing on the minutiae: the muscle used to curl a finger, whether one breathes in or out when raising an arm.
Once awareness of these details has been gained, patterns can be broken and new, more natural pathways can be nurtured by professionals—i.e., dancers, actors—and amateurs alike. However, in order for these methods to have significant effect, the miniscule must first be translated into the grand. This is no easy feat, and changes in posture and movement are often unrecognizable to the untrained eye.
One methodology whose effects are easily recognizable is GaGa. The technique was developed more than twenty years ago by Ohad Naharin, the artistic director of Israel’s powerful Batsheva Dance Company, which is revisiting the Brooklyn Academy of Music this month. Naharin developed GaGa after he was forced to find new ways of movement for himself due to a back injury.
GaGa has more to do with discovering a certain quality, texture, and intention of movement than a specific technique. “The first thing we do is cover the mirrors and we try to get the dancers to really start sensing their bodies,” Naharin told me on a past visit to New York. “So many dancers dance with just one idea; their school’s idea, a strength idea, an idea of line, or form, or drama.
But there’s always more than just one idea that you can work with.”
The outcome, among Naharin’s dancers at least, is a captivating mix of seemingly conflicting expressive qualities. Batsheva dancers exhibit an extraordinary combination of power and softness, energy and suppleness.
These textures will no doubt be on view in the company’s New York City premiere of Naharin’s Max at BAM. In Max, Naharin plays with extreme notions of pain and happiness, solitude and sharing, individuality and community. Batsheva dancers, with their seemingly innate command of the soft and stark, powerful and meek, are expertly equipped to deal with these inherently interlinked polar opposites.
Encore Magazine
http://www.encoremag.com/?q=article&id=396
by Mary Staub
Countless methodologies maintain they will bring on a healthier, more natural, effortless way of moving. The Feldenkrais Method, Alexander Technique, Body-Mind Centering, and Ideokinesis are just a few that come to mind. Most of these encourage practitioners to become aware of their own existent movement patterns by focusing on the minutiae: the muscle used to curl a finger, whether one breathes in or out when raising an arm.
Once awareness of these details has been gained, patterns can be broken and new, more natural pathways can be nurtured by professionals—i.e., dancers, actors—and amateurs alike. However, in order for these methods to have significant effect, the miniscule must first be translated into the grand. This is no easy feat, and changes in posture and movement are often unrecognizable to the untrained eye.
One methodology whose effects are easily recognizable is GaGa. The technique was developed more than twenty years ago by Ohad Naharin, the artistic director of Israel’s powerful Batsheva Dance Company, which is revisiting the Brooklyn Academy of Music this month. Naharin developed GaGa after he was forced to find new ways of movement for himself due to a back injury.
GaGa has more to do with discovering a certain quality, texture, and intention of movement than a specific technique. “The first thing we do is cover the mirrors and we try to get the dancers to really start sensing their bodies,” Naharin told me on a past visit to New York. “So many dancers dance with just one idea; their school’s idea, a strength idea, an idea of line, or form, or drama.
But there’s always more than just one idea that you can work with.”
The outcome, among Naharin’s dancers at least, is a captivating mix of seemingly conflicting expressive qualities. Batsheva dancers exhibit an extraordinary combination of power and softness, energy and suppleness.
These textures will no doubt be on view in the company’s New York City premiere of Naharin’s Max at BAM. In Max, Naharin plays with extreme notions of pain and happiness, solitude and sharing, individuality and community. Batsheva dancers, with their seemingly innate command of the soft and stark, powerful and meek, are expertly equipped to deal with these inherently interlinked polar opposites.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
2009 Flamenco Festival
Encore Magazine
http://encoremag.com/?q=article&id=378
Rhythm, passion and dexterity at City Center, Skirball Center and Carnegie Hall
by Mary Staub
Flamenco is best experienced in intimate surroundings, in dimly lit Andalusian bodegas with wood tables and chairs, hidden away in narrow side streets, tapas and red wine flowing until morning. Here, the duende (soul force) of flamenco is inescapable and permeates an audience fully. Here, the rhythm of the bailaores (flamenco dancers) sends your heart racing, the passion of the cantaores (singers) takes your breath away, the dexterity of the tocaores (flamenco guitarists) sends chills down your spine.
But not everyone can go to Spain.
Thus the Flamenco Festival is bringing Andalusian artists to large-scale New York theaters, including to City Center and NYU’s Skirball Center, for the ninth year in a row this February. Although flamenco often appears more distant, deliberate and orderly in the proscenium theater, this year’s artists—who hail from rich flamenco backgrounds and include the flamenco dynasty of
Los Farruco—promise to transcend the barrier the stage setting often creates.
Antonio Montoya Flores (El Farruco), the patriarch of Los Farruco until his death, came from a traditional Spanish gypsy background and began performing gypsy dances at markets as a child.
Later, when performing flamenco from his gypsy tradition in more typical theater settings, he was disinterested in ostentatious showmanship, and together with his family focused fully on embodying the passion the art form demands. Farruquito, El Farruco’s grandson, conceived and directed this year’s program, which features multiple family members who are well-known in their own right.
Antonio Gades, also from a flamenco family, is a flamenco legend of a different sort. He created and brought popular shows to major theaters worldwide, and is said to have made flamenco palatable to a wider audience. His “Carmen,” which began as Carlos Saura’s award-winning film by the same name (in which Gades collaborated and starred), is here being re-staged by the Antonio Gades Company, a company established shortly after Gades’s death to continue his legacy.
Smaller festival productions include “La Puerta Abierta,” in which dancer Isabel Bayón, born in Seville, Spain, responds to the cantaor Terremoto. And in the concert “Noche de Sevilla” the cantaor Arcángel represents a new generation of flamenco masters and incorporates jazz and international elements in his music. He’s appearing alongside the dancer Rosario Toledo and pianist Dorantes.
For each of these artists, flamenco is a deep-seated family tradition, and what they bring to the stage is nourished by those who came before them. And, as with most family traditions, flamenco takes on a unique flavor—and duende—dependent upon what lineage an artist is from. Enjoy sampling them all this month!
http://encoremag.com/?q=article&id=378
Rhythm, passion and dexterity at City Center, Skirball Center and Carnegie Hall
by Mary Staub
Flamenco is best experienced in intimate surroundings, in dimly lit Andalusian bodegas with wood tables and chairs, hidden away in narrow side streets, tapas and red wine flowing until morning. Here, the duende (soul force) of flamenco is inescapable and permeates an audience fully. Here, the rhythm of the bailaores (flamenco dancers) sends your heart racing, the passion of the cantaores (singers) takes your breath away, the dexterity of the tocaores (flamenco guitarists) sends chills down your spine.
But not everyone can go to Spain.
Thus the Flamenco Festival is bringing Andalusian artists to large-scale New York theaters, including to City Center and NYU’s Skirball Center, for the ninth year in a row this February. Although flamenco often appears more distant, deliberate and orderly in the proscenium theater, this year’s artists—who hail from rich flamenco backgrounds and include the flamenco dynasty of
Los Farruco—promise to transcend the barrier the stage setting often creates.
Antonio Montoya Flores (El Farruco), the patriarch of Los Farruco until his death, came from a traditional Spanish gypsy background and began performing gypsy dances at markets as a child.
Later, when performing flamenco from his gypsy tradition in more typical theater settings, he was disinterested in ostentatious showmanship, and together with his family focused fully on embodying the passion the art form demands. Farruquito, El Farruco’s grandson, conceived and directed this year’s program, which features multiple family members who are well-known in their own right.
Antonio Gades, also from a flamenco family, is a flamenco legend of a different sort. He created and brought popular shows to major theaters worldwide, and is said to have made flamenco palatable to a wider audience. His “Carmen,” which began as Carlos Saura’s award-winning film by the same name (in which Gades collaborated and starred), is here being re-staged by the Antonio Gades Company, a company established shortly after Gades’s death to continue his legacy.
Smaller festival productions include “La Puerta Abierta,” in which dancer Isabel Bayón, born in Seville, Spain, responds to the cantaor Terremoto. And in the concert “Noche de Sevilla” the cantaor Arcángel represents a new generation of flamenco masters and incorporates jazz and international elements in his music. He’s appearing alongside the dancer Rosario Toledo and pianist Dorantes.
For each of these artists, flamenco is a deep-seated family tradition, and what they bring to the stage is nourished by those who came before them. And, as with most family traditions, flamenco takes on a unique flavor—and duende—dependent upon what lineage an artist is from. Enjoy sampling them all this month!
State of Change
Encore Magazine
http://www.encoremag.com
New work from the prolific Paul Taylor Dance Co. at City Center
by Mary Staub
Since his company’s inception more than five decades ago, Paul Taylor has choreographed two new dance works almost every year—and 2008 was no exception. Starting February 25th, during a three-week City Center season, the Paul Taylor Dance Company will perform the New York premieres of Mr. Taylor’s two newest works, Changes and Beloved Renegade, both created in 2008. The works are Mr. Taylor’s 128th and 129th, respectively.
That’s a lot of dances.
The number of cities the company has appeared in is equally impressive: more than 520. The number of countries, too: 62. Paul Taylor has been honored as a leader of modern dance with awards including a MacArthur “Genius” Award and a National Medal of the Arts. Almost everything about this modern dance company hints at greatness, and one might assume that its course for continued creativity has been perfectly paved.
But in the world of modern dance obstacles always occur and force detours. Global success, artistically, doesn’t necessarily translate into success financially; especially when measured in terms of Manhattan money.
Because of rising rents in SoHo, the Paul Taylor Dance Foundation—comprised of the Taylor Company, Taylor 2, and Taylor School—is moving to new quarters on the Lower East Side this year after making the second floor of a SoHo building its home for more than two decades. The new 20-year lease will take effect on March 1st, during the company’s City Center season.
Despite this rerouting, though, Mr. Taylor has stuck to his long-standing schedule of creating two new dances per year.
For his latest works, Mr. Taylor has again collaborated with Jennifer Tipton for lighting (more than eighty collaborations to date) and Santo Loquasto for costumes (more than 35). In the first, Changes, Mr. Taylor revisits the 1960s and youth’s yearning. The second, Beloved Renegade, is inspired by the life and work of Walt Whitman and is set to Francis Poulenc’s Gloria.
The season’s repertoire includes Scudorama, which hasn’t come to City Center in forty years, De Sueños, De Sueños que se Repiten (both 2007), Promethean Fire (2002), Esplanade (1975), and many more.
Mr. Taylor has pointedly noted (in the words of French novelist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr), “The more things change the more they stay the same.”
http://www.encoremag.com
New work from the prolific Paul Taylor Dance Co. at City Center
by Mary Staub
Since his company’s inception more than five decades ago, Paul Taylor has choreographed two new dance works almost every year—and 2008 was no exception. Starting February 25th, during a three-week City Center season, the Paul Taylor Dance Company will perform the New York premieres of Mr. Taylor’s two newest works, Changes and Beloved Renegade, both created in 2008. The works are Mr. Taylor’s 128th and 129th, respectively.
That’s a lot of dances.
The number of cities the company has appeared in is equally impressive: more than 520. The number of countries, too: 62. Paul Taylor has been honored as a leader of modern dance with awards including a MacArthur “Genius” Award and a National Medal of the Arts. Almost everything about this modern dance company hints at greatness, and one might assume that its course for continued creativity has been perfectly paved.
But in the world of modern dance obstacles always occur and force detours. Global success, artistically, doesn’t necessarily translate into success financially; especially when measured in terms of Manhattan money.
Because of rising rents in SoHo, the Paul Taylor Dance Foundation—comprised of the Taylor Company, Taylor 2, and Taylor School—is moving to new quarters on the Lower East Side this year after making the second floor of a SoHo building its home for more than two decades. The new 20-year lease will take effect on March 1st, during the company’s City Center season.
Despite this rerouting, though, Mr. Taylor has stuck to his long-standing schedule of creating two new dances per year.
For his latest works, Mr. Taylor has again collaborated with Jennifer Tipton for lighting (more than eighty collaborations to date) and Santo Loquasto for costumes (more than 35). In the first, Changes, Mr. Taylor revisits the 1960s and youth’s yearning. The second, Beloved Renegade, is inspired by the life and work of Walt Whitman and is set to Francis Poulenc’s Gloria.
The season’s repertoire includes Scudorama, which hasn’t come to City Center in forty years, De Sueños, De Sueños que se Repiten (both 2007), Promethean Fire (2002), Esplanade (1975), and many more.
Mr. Taylor has pointedly noted (in the words of French novelist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr), “The more things change the more they stay the same.”
It's Her Party: Four Decades of Meredith Monk
Encore Magazine
http://encoremag.com/?q=article&id=374
Underground music’s matriarch throws herself a live retrospective at the Whitney
by Mary Staub
Since early childhood, sound and movement have been interlinked for Meredith Monk. Coming from a tradition of singers—her mother sang in soap commercials in the 40s, her grandfather was a bass-baritone—song was first nature to Monk. Movement, on the other hand, came less naturally. As a child, Monk was physically uncoordinated due to an eye challenge and so, starting at age three, she took Dalcroze Eurythmics classes to learn to get in touch with movement through music.
Years later, in the mid-1960s, after studying both voice and movement at Sarah Lawrence College, and performing gesture-based works in New York City churches and galleries, it was Monk’s more arduously developed language, movement, that taught her something about her mother tongue, voice.
“In working with my physical limitations I was able to find a movement style that was very much my own,” says Monk. “I think coming from physical limitations is a blessing in disguise because it forces you to find a personal style. I applied the same working process to my voice, where I had a more virtuosic instrument from the start, and found I had a huge range to work with.”
Monk has since then developed an eerily unique voice vocabulary that works in rhythms and tonalities atypical of Western musical traditions, and which oftentimes cannot be reproduced by others.
“Some of the vocabulary you really have to have in your bones, intuitive details, that even my ensemble [doesn’t] replicate,” Monk says. “But I don’t try to make other people sound like me; I write music that tries to use their individual color and texture of voice or music.”
Monk’s resulting compositions are highly textured arrangements that convey different colors, genders, ages, characters, landscapes, realities. Furthermore, already from day one, much of Monk’s work has been site-specific, adding yet another dimension to her creations. Monk’s one-woman performances in galleries and churches from the 1960s have since evolved into richly layered spatial and musical compositions, sometimes involving more than 100 artists.
On February 1st, Monk’s voice, and many others, will resonate through the Whitney Museum of American Art in a celebration of Monk’s artistic work past, present and future. Probable participants include Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, which brings together artists whose backgrounds range from Chinese to Western opera, from Broadway to musical theater. Slated to join the Ensemble are The M6: Meredith Monk Music Third Generation, a newly formed ensemble dedicated to continuing Monk’s legacy with younger vocalists, Todd Reynolds’s String Quartet and the Claudia Quintet.
http://encoremag.com/?q=article&id=374
Underground music’s matriarch throws herself a live retrospective at the Whitney
by Mary Staub
Since early childhood, sound and movement have been interlinked for Meredith Monk. Coming from a tradition of singers—her mother sang in soap commercials in the 40s, her grandfather was a bass-baritone—song was first nature to Monk. Movement, on the other hand, came less naturally. As a child, Monk was physically uncoordinated due to an eye challenge and so, starting at age three, she took Dalcroze Eurythmics classes to learn to get in touch with movement through music.
Years later, in the mid-1960s, after studying both voice and movement at Sarah Lawrence College, and performing gesture-based works in New York City churches and galleries, it was Monk’s more arduously developed language, movement, that taught her something about her mother tongue, voice.
“In working with my physical limitations I was able to find a movement style that was very much my own,” says Monk. “I think coming from physical limitations is a blessing in disguise because it forces you to find a personal style. I applied the same working process to my voice, where I had a more virtuosic instrument from the start, and found I had a huge range to work with.”
Monk has since then developed an eerily unique voice vocabulary that works in rhythms and tonalities atypical of Western musical traditions, and which oftentimes cannot be reproduced by others.
“Some of the vocabulary you really have to have in your bones, intuitive details, that even my ensemble [doesn’t] replicate,” Monk says. “But I don’t try to make other people sound like me; I write music that tries to use their individual color and texture of voice or music.”
Monk’s resulting compositions are highly textured arrangements that convey different colors, genders, ages, characters, landscapes, realities. Furthermore, already from day one, much of Monk’s work has been site-specific, adding yet another dimension to her creations. Monk’s one-woman performances in galleries and churches from the 1960s have since evolved into richly layered spatial and musical compositions, sometimes involving more than 100 artists.
On February 1st, Monk’s voice, and many others, will resonate through the Whitney Museum of American Art in a celebration of Monk’s artistic work past, present and future. Probable participants include Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, which brings together artists whose backgrounds range from Chinese to Western opera, from Broadway to musical theater. Slated to join the Ensemble are The M6: Meredith Monk Music Third Generation, a newly formed ensemble dedicated to continuing Monk’s legacy with younger vocalists, Todd Reynolds’s String Quartet and the Claudia Quintet.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Limon Dance Company’s Next 100 Years - Fresh work by a former member has home alongside the classics
Encore Magazine
http://www.encoremag.com
by Mary Staub December 2008
For some reason modern dance, unlike theater, classical music or literature, is often thought of as fleeting, ephemeral, disposable. But just like any art form, modern dance has a heritage that can, and should, be kept alive.
The Limon Dance Company, celebrating the centennial of Jose Limon’s birth this year, does just that. During their two-week season at the Joyce Theater this December, their program weaves together past, present and future.
“We have a history and classics in dance,” says Carla Maxwell, the artistic director of the company. “Yes, we need to keep stretching the limits, but we also need to recognize that we have living documents. If it’s a good work, it needs to be seen. People don’t think we should throw Mozart, Beethoven, Bach and Debussy away. We listen to a piece of music many times. We need to treasure the works we’ve made in dance just the same.”
In this vain, the company will perform Limon’s classic “The Moor’s Pavane” and excerpts from his “A Choreographic Offering,” an homage to his mentor, Doris Humphrey. His lesser-known, but equally powerful and pertinent “The Traitor,” from the 1950s, has also been re-created. Like so many of Limon’s works, “The Traitor,” which Limon wrote in response to the McCarthy hearings, looks to literature, history and religion for inspiration. Here, it is the Christ-Judas tale of betrayal.
But the Limon Company was always about more than Limon himself, and from the start worked under a repertory concept that presented works by company members and contemporaries such as Anna Sokolow. Sokolow’s 1955 piece, “Rooms,” was re-created under the direction of Sokolow disciple Jim May for the company’s current season.
As for the present and future, former company member Clay Tallaferro’s new work, his first for the company, “Into My Heart’s House,” will have its New York premiere in December. It’s based on Tallaferro’s own ties to Limon, which began when he, as a young man in Virginia, saw Limon perform on television. Tallaferro was stirred to his soul and inspired to dance. He met Jose Limon and joined his company many years later. “Into My Heart’s House” is work that, like so much of Limon’s own, may deserve to be seen again in years to come.
“It’s a journey of different events that keep unfolding, take you places and leave you saying, ‘What’s next?’” Maxwell commented. “[After attending its world premiere in Los Angeles this fall,] Donald McKayle said, ‘Beautiful, I want to see more.’”
by Mary Staub December 2008
For some reason modern dance, unlike theater, classical music or literature, is often thought of as fleeting, ephemeral, disposable. But just like any art form, modern dance has a heritage that can, and should, be kept alive.
The Limon Dance Company, celebrating the centennial of Jose Limon’s birth this year, does just that. During their two-week season at the Joyce Theater this December, their program weaves together past, present and future.
“We have a history and classics in dance,” says Carla Maxwell, the artistic director of the company. “Yes, we need to keep stretching the limits, but we also need to recognize that we have living documents. If it’s a good work, it needs to be seen. People don’t think we should throw Mozart, Beethoven, Bach and Debussy away. We listen to a piece of music many times. We need to treasure the works we’ve made in dance just the same.”
In this vain, the company will perform Limon’s classic “The Moor’s Pavane” and excerpts from his “A Choreographic Offering,” an homage to his mentor, Doris Humphrey. His lesser-known, but equally powerful and pertinent “The Traitor,” from the 1950s, has also been re-created. Like so many of Limon’s works, “The Traitor,” which Limon wrote in response to the McCarthy hearings, looks to literature, history and religion for inspiration. Here, it is the Christ-Judas tale of betrayal.
But the Limon Company was always about more than Limon himself, and from the start worked under a repertory concept that presented works by company members and contemporaries such as Anna Sokolow. Sokolow’s 1955 piece, “Rooms,” was re-created under the direction of Sokolow disciple Jim May for the company’s current season.
As for the present and future, former company member Clay Tallaferro’s new work, his first for the company, “Into My Heart’s House,” will have its New York premiere in December. It’s based on Tallaferro’s own ties to Limon, which began when he, as a young man in Virginia, saw Limon perform on television. Tallaferro was stirred to his soul and inspired to dance. He met Jose Limon and joined his company many years later. “Into My Heart’s House” is work that, like so much of Limon’s own, may deserve to be seen again in years to come.
“It’s a journey of different events that keep unfolding, take you places and leave you saying, ‘What’s next?’” Maxwell commented. “[After attending its world premiere in Los Angeles this fall,] Donald McKayle said, ‘Beautiful, I want to see more.’”
Saturday, November 8, 2008
On the Record with Alyson Stoner (Dancer Magazine)
Alyson Stoner is just 15
years old, but already she’s danced for Missy Elliott and Eminem, done
voice-overs for “Lilo & Stitch,” “W.I.T.C.H.” and “Pompoko,” co-hosted on
the Disney Channel, acted in commercials, and appeared alongside Steve Martin
in “Cheaper by the Dozen,” among a slew of other appearances. She teaches
hip-hop in L.A.
Do you remember when you
took your first dance steps? I was the pipsqueak who constantly danced around
the house. I transformed any fireplace or back porch into a stage. Really, I've
been dancing since the day I could walk.
And when did any “formal”
training start? When I was three, I enrolled at the O'Connell Dance Studio in Toledo , Ohio
The O'Connell's allowed
their advanced teen members to instruct certain classes of mine. Immediately,
we 3-5 years olds listened to them, because they were "older kids"
and "cooler than cool." Every instructor came to class smiling, so I
linked dancing and music with joy and happiness—that feeling hasn't left since.
What is one of your most
memorable moments from back then? Being backstage during a 30-second costume
change. It was exhilarating and completely nerve-wracking, but it all paid off
once I hit the stage.
And what made you start
taking modeling classes, also in Toledo L.A.
So, when did you relocate
to L.A. Toledo L.A.
Alyson Stoner and Roshon Fegan of Disney Channel's "
Photo by Richard Cartwright
Then I found Millennium
Dance Complex in L.A.
How have you managed to
keep up with school and family life with all of this? I enrolled in a
home-schooling program that allowed me to complete curriculum at my own pace,
so I actually graduated high school at fourteen. Before then, I was accepted
into a junior college at thirteen, and I plan to get my general education
there, and move on to an Ivy League. As for my family, they're the reason for
my being, and their support is where I draw my strength from, so I definitely
make time to spend with them.
When did you realize you
wanted to make performance your career? Up until “Camp Rock
One of your first major
jobs was to co-host the Disney Channel. How did you get this position? I
auditioned of course! We definitely didn't "know" people in L.A. L.A.
Were you nervous? I never
considered hosting to be an unusual job for an 8-year-old. I was doing what I
loved and having fun. I wasn't nervous, because I'd always learned to step up
to the plate and challenge myself.
How have you managed to
stay grounded with all the glitz and glamour that surround you? I keep my
relationships with family and friends as strong as possible, because they got
me where I am. My parents encouraged me to try new things, and if I was ever
disappointed, envious or negative, they'd show me why it's important to work
hard, be happy for others and always see the glass as half-full.
What might you say to other
dancers who hope to get to where you are some day? Keep your focus on the
craft—don’t get caught up in glory of success that comes along with it. Be
focused on doing your best, and don’t be worried about success. Success isn’t
measured by how many people know your name, but by how many lives you touch.
It’s important that kids, teens, adults understand that depending on the work
that you put in, that’s where you will go. What you sow is what you will reap.
Do you have role models?
Natalie Portman is hard-working and well-educated, which is what I aspire to
be.
And how do you balance out
your busy life of performing? My busy life of performing—haha. I don't know any
other way of living. I'm a firm believer of making the most out of every day. I
rest when I need to, but only to refuel my body for the upcoming tasks and
challenges.
Is there anything else you
could imagine yourself doing? I could imagine myself doing anything. I don't
want to limit myself to this culture's expectations or ideas of what
occupations are good and bad. I plan to stay in the industry. However, if I'm
supposed to be in a cubicle, then I'll happily work at a desk for a living.
What are you currently
working on? “The Alyson Stoner Project” is a dance-instructional, hybrid music
video melding many forms of entertainment into one. I've designed my own dance
shoe with Bloch Dance Apparel Corporation. “Phineas and Ferb,” “Kung Fu Magoo”
and “Kingdom Hearts” are three animated projects I'm a part of. My first music
video, where I’m the singer, will air on Disney Channel around the beginning of
the year. I'm training vocally, working with songwriters and producers and
continuing to teach dance on Friday nights.
And what would you like to
work on, or who would you like to work with, in the future? As long as I feel
comfortable watching my scenes next to my grandma, I'll know the jobs are age-appropriate
and beneficial to my career. I'd love to tap with Savion Glover, perform with
Mia Michaels or record a song with Phil Wickham.
Where do you see yourself
in ten years? The possibilities are endless. In ten years, I see myself doing
whatever I'm supposed to be doing. The future is not in my hands. All I can do
is make the most of each moment—each day.
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