Capturing the Wind

by Virginia Myers Kelly, American Magazine, Spring 2002

Vladimir Angelov '96, has been blowing through the contemporary ballet world since he was 16, when he challenged his classical ballet teacher in the National Ballet School of his native Bulgaria. "I was changing the steps," he recalls. "I'd say, 'Don't you think this is more musical?'" When the instructor told him to make his own dance, Angelov dismissed the disciplinary tone and took him literally.

His newest work, Chinook, blew through the Washington dance community when it was premiered in January by City Dance Ensemble at Washington's Dance Place. The Washington Post wrote: "choreographer Vladimir Angelov provided all the elements for the dancer to become an element herself-the wind. The work is an intense whisper."

After dancing for years with Bulgaria's Ballet Arabesque, the classically trained Angelov defected to the United States in 1988 with his mother and brother. He came to AU in the 1990s and studied with Naima Prevots, whom he praises for allowing him to follow his passion and focus his study on choreography. "I became a professional choreographer at AU." He chose AU over a full scholarship at New York University (NYU), because NYU offered Angelov little flexibility in its requirements, while "AU offered me what is close to my heart."

Today, Angelov's work has been performed all over the world-Paris, Vienna, Kyoto, Latvia, Puerto Rico, Athens, New York, where reviewers describe Angelov's choreography as "dazzling," "breathtaking," and "infused with a spirit of discovery." His latest work includes dances for the Kirov Ballet in St. Petersburg and the Kirov Academy of Ballet in Washington; the Vail International Dance Festival in Colorado; the Kennedy Center Theatre production of Soul Possessed; and the San Francisco Ballet and the Alberta Ballet in Canada.

Born and raised in Bulgaria, schooled in Austria and Germany, married to a Japanese woman, and living in the capital of the United States, this self-described "international man," uses his internationalism in his work. For Chinook, he chose the mystic-sounding fujara-a Slovakian woodwind-as accompaniment; for another work, he incorporated kabuki, the Japanese theatrical dance form. Including international elements "is like putting more and more windows in your house, to let more light in," he says.

The search for "windows" has stretched Angelov far beyond classical ballet. Ballet dancers "have more capacity with their bodies," he says, while "Modern dance people use the body in a more natural way." He fuses the two forms to move his work into new territory, to "make a flow of two languages without breaking the logic of what you're trying to say."

And just what is he trying to say? Different dances have different messages -there is Ginare, literally "the anger of the earth," inspired by earthquake; he created Suite Dreams, a story ballet, for Alberta; there is Lost Horizon for the Kirov; and Prism, an exploration of light, for City Dance Ensemble. Each piece focuses on a theme that can be articulated in one sentence, and each attends to detail. "For me everything in human movement is dance, and everything means something. Even in stillness there is dance."

Fresh Feats with New Beats

by Virginia Myers Kelly, American Magazine, Spring 2002

Lights come up, a trumpet sings a lyric melody, and the audience settles in for an evening of the graceful limbs and lines of modern dance-then suddenly they are startled by a percussive tap, inserted like punctuation into the flow of the movement.

Choreographer Barry Blumenfeld '93, '97, creator of Tap Fusion, has taken modern dance and infused its energy with "hoofing," by incorporating elements of tap dance. It's a technique Blumenfeld developed at AU, when he first took up dance thanks to a scrambled class schedule. He remembers thinking, "Hey, I'm in college, I can do whatever I want." He took a tap class from Carol Vaughn. Within a matter of weeks, Blumenfeld, who studied psychology and theatre as an undergraduate, had decided he was a dancer. He also earned an MA in dance from AU and began Tap Fusion four years ago in New York.

Tap gave birth to Blumenfeld's choreography-his first piece was a stair dance, and his second started out like a Fred Astaire dance, he says, and "turned hip-hoppy." When professors urged him to break further from conventional tap rhythm and structure, he developed a more lyrical style, and his third piece "flowed and slid all over the stage."

"I was like, 'Aha! I need to do more, it can't be clickety-clack with the feet for me."
Now settled in Manhattan with his wife, April Cantor '95, Blumenfeld has a wide repertoire of modern dances enhanced by tap and set to music he commissions. One piece is based on a letter from a former building manager. The letter's odd punctuation inspired Blumenfeld to set it to dance. The manager became a landlady, portrayed by the voice of AU's Naima Prevots, whom Blumenfeld calls "a major mentor in my life."

His newest piece is an evening-length dance inspired by blessings at the Jewish wedding ceremony. Compelled to create a distinctly Jewish dance, Blumenfeld noted that many artists tackle the Holocaust, and others describe the stereotypical "guilt, whining, and kvetching" of Jews. But, he counters, "Judaism is a joyous thing for me. I think the joy gets overlooked.

"I wanted to share something, but I didn't want it to be so Jewish that it would alienate 99.5 percent of the world." To create Sheva B'rachot, or Seven Blessings, he gathered a group of artistic friends-though all but he were disaffiliated Jews-and, he says, like Talmudic scholars, they explored Jewish texts on marriage. The result is a mix of music, video, painting, and dance. It was presented as a work in progress in February and is scheduled for a May performance at Manhattan's respected 92d Street Y.

That fact is significant-this young talent already has shown his work twice in the city, and each time his performance has sold out. "Tap Fusion is a niche," he says. "I've thrown away a lot of the boundaries . . . I'm on the fringe of two different worlds. The modern dance world doesn't want me on their dance floors. [In] the tap world, the purists aren't sure what I do is tap."

It's challenge enough to create interest in a city saturated with choreographers, but Blumenfeld has won a highly competitive New York Foundation of the Arts fellowship in choreography to begin Sheva, and he has been reviewed in the New York Times and Dance magazine. He attributes much of his success to his training at AU, where he was allowed to focus his studies on preparing to run a dance company and teach-exactly what he does now in New York.

"My goal is to affect how people see and think about dance," says Blumenfeld. "Even if they don't like my work, [I hope] people leave the show thinking, 'I've never thought about dance quite that way'. . . That's good for dance as an art form."

Tap Fusion on-line: www.tapfusion.com