CityDance Ensemble performs Sophie Maslow’s 1942 piece "Folksay" on Friday. Written by DCist Contributor Josh Novikoff With long horizontal strides, wide smiles that reached the upper tier of Strathmore’s grand 2,000-seat concert hall, and arms fully outstretched at an angle to either side, the CityDance Ensemble began The Songwriters, the final performance of their 2007-2008 season. Farmer boys were clad in jeans and flannel shirts; farmers’ daughters sported flowing frocks. Moving briskly in rows......

Area dance company CityDance Ensemble wraps up a busy season tonight with The Songwriters, a tribute to some of America’s greatest songwriters including Woody Guthrie, Sonny Terry, and Bruce Springsteen. While CityDance consistently puts on a great program, Artistic Director Paul Gordon Emerson’s piece set to Springsteen’s music is sure to steal the show. Born to Run will use Springstein’s iconic music and legendary lyrics to showcase the spirit of youth, adventure, and growing up......

Starting this morning and continuing until Saturday evening, the Start with the Arts Family Festival is holding performances and kids workshops in Columbus Circle, in front of Union Station. VSA Arts, which is throwing the celebration, is an organization dedicated to making a place where people with disabilities can participate in and enjoy the visual and performing arts. As part of the festival, Lisa Bufano and Sonsheree Giles of AXIS Dance Company will perform a......

If National Dance Week got your blood pumping, consider heading over to Joy of Motion’s Bethesda Studios this Sunday afternoon for Hurray for BOLLYWOOD! The adult workshop class invites all levels and styles of dancers to come and explore Indian dance. For those of you who haven’t had Dhoom on your Netflix queue lately, Bollywood refers to India’s enormous film industry; the dance-heavy movies, with frequently over-the-top plot lines, are often compared to old American......

If fears of that $100 fill-up forced you to cut your weekly flamenco lesson, you might want to take advantage of Dance/MetroDC’s second annual Dance Is The Answer event in honor of National Dance Week. National Dance Week was organized in 1981 and has been an annual event ever since, but D.C. only really joined in on the fun about a year ago. That said, there’s an impressive lineup this year. Beginning today through......

MetroPerforms!, the city's solution to the perceived scourge of subway busking, is once again seeking District of Columbia-based performers for a second year of the program, which hires local singers, dancers, musicians, poets and other performers to show off their talents at select Metro station entrances. Auditions will take place on May 2 and May 3 at Metro headquarters. Currently, auditions are only for those who want to perform in D.C. stations. Metro and the......

The annual summertime deluge of theater shows comes back again this year with the Capital Fringe Festival, which announced today it will run from July 10 to 27. The non-profit, which started the city-wide festival in 2006, took home two well-deserved awards last year for their programming, the Mayor's Arts Award for Innovation in the Arts and the Momentum Award from the Downtown DC BID. This year's festival promises us even more shows and participants:......

Most of us take our iPods everywhere nowadays, and it’s not uncommon to see people wearing them in unusual places. In restaurants. In the grocery store. There are even gizmos that allow you to bring your iPod in the shower with you now. But when is the last time you saw people wearing their iPods at the theater? Legendary modern dance choreographer Merce Cunningham considered this, and tonight and Saturday evening at Sidney Harman......

There are dozens of galleries and performance spaces in the Washington, D.C. area, but few actually allow you to observe as an original work is created each night. In performances of Connect Transfer by Shen Wei Dance Arts in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall this weekend, twelve dancers will create a new work each evening with “live action painting” using varying colors of tempura paint on a white canvas. Fusing dance, music, and visual art,......

If DJ Rekha's set at the Black Cat in January is any indication, there is an unrequited demand for international dance music in the District. That event not only sold out, but people of all stripes were dancing to the same beat and the crowd reflected one of this city's greatest assets, its cultural and ethnic diversity. One can expect more of the same tomorrow night at Bohemian Caverns, where two of global electronica's most......

Everything old is new again this weekend, as CityDance Ensemble partners with actors from the Shakespeare Theatre Company to present Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Blending together dance, literature, theater, and music, the pairing of the two groups aims to explore age-old interpretations of Shakespeare’s sonnets as well as look at them with a modern eye. There's a whole lot of talent joining together to present Shakespeare’s Sonnets, between all of the dancers, actors and musicians involved in......

With a number of area teams gearing up for a playoff run, it's an exciting time for sports in the Washington area. Here's what you should be watching this week. Don't hesitate to leave your own suggestions in the comments, and, if you're so inclined, shoot me an email with suggestions for next week. Tuesday Most of this week's slate is packed with some great action. Tuesday is an exception. For those that aren't reading......

Valentine’s Day has come and gone, but love is still in the air at the Washington Ballet’s England Studio Theatre. 7x7: Love Duets celebrates its fifth anniversary program of the company’s popular series. Seven choreographers are given the opportunity to create seven different seven-minute world premieres centered on the theme of love. Saturday evening’s performance of 7x7: Love Duets showed that many of the choreographers were aware of often clichéd "ballet love stories" and did......

Some would argue that jazz lost a certain something when it decided to leave dance behind and evolve a more sophisticated and purely art driven ethos. Because jazz and dance only co-exist in more formal choreographed settings such as modern dance, yesterday's sold-out performance at the Kennedy Center by tap dancer extraordinaire Savion Glover (pictured) and the McCoy Tyner Trio was a refreshing departure from the average jazz concert hall experience. From a musical standpoint,......

Attention DCist readers with reality TV show aspirations: FOX's So You Think You Can Dance is coming to the Atlas Performing Arts Center on H Street NE on Thursday. From 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. tomorrow, dancers ages 18 to 30 have the chance to see if they have what it takes to be applauded or booed on national TV. Be prepared to wait in line, because producers expect anywhere from 300-1200 dancers (callbacks are......

Just in time for the most romantic day of the year, tonight is opening night for Liz Lerman Dance Exchange’s Love, Etcetera: Dances to William Shakespeare and Willie Nelson. Dancers from the Theatre and Performance Studies Program at Georgetown University will join the company to present two works for the next three evenings. The first piece, “The Farthest Earth From Thee” is a Shakespeare-based performance work featuring performers of all abilities, including dancers with physical......

There’s no way to deny that dancers are athletic. All of that leaping, turning, jumping – it’s a lot of work. The performers of AEROS, however, are literally athletes from the prestigious Romanian Gymnastics Federation who blend acrobatics, modern dance, theater and original music to create something entirely original. Developed in 1998 by choreographers David Parsons, Moses Pendleton and Daniel Ezralow, who also collaborated with the creators of the tap sensation “Stomp”, Luke Cresswell and......

Last week the Washington Ballet company concluded an impressive run of shows, but the D.C. dance scene continues to bring it in dynamic ways these days. This week there's at least one set of dance shows looking to continue the momentum. Right on time for Valentine's Day, the eighth annual Flamenco Festival will steam up the stage with four shows this weekend and next week at GWU's Lisner Auditorium. Famous flamenco singers Carmen Linares and......

The legendary Kirov Ballet company is back at the Kennedy Center for a seven-performance engagement of La Bayadère. This 1941 three-act Soviet version of choreographer Marius Petipa's classic ballet was performed flawlessly by the company on opening night Tuesday. The ballet is set in India, and this production's set and costumes are exotic, particularly the jewel-encrusted belly-baring costumes of some of the ballerinas. The company makes a distinct effort to make the story come......

In its third season, New York based modern dance company KDNY returns to Dance Place this weekend to perform Charges from Domremy, a work inspired by Joan of Arc. In the seventy-minute work choreographed by Kathleen Dyer and performed to Richard Einhorn’s oratio Voices of Light, a cast of thirteen dancers tells the story of Joan of Arc from “the divine voices that led her into battle to her subsequent capture and condemnation by......

Bhangra, an infectious folk music and dance style from the Punjab region of India and Pakistan, has slowly crept into the mainstream club scene. The driving force behind this increase in popularity are the South Asian DJs of Great Britain and North America, who took this traditional form and infused it with the programmed sounds of hip-hop, dancehall, and techno. One of the most well-known names in this movement is DJ Rekha (pictured), a New......

We're frankly mostly of the mind that New Year's Eve is best spent at a house party with good friends -- going out to a club is almost always overpriced and often a big letdown. But in the event you don't have a party to attend, are new in town, or for any other reason are facing tonight without a firm plan, here's a few of our suggestions on how to have a fun and......

>> The Culkin School of Traditional Irish Dance isn't anywhere nearly as embarrassing as Riverdance and its ilk -- think real jigs without the terrible music and costumes. Accompanied tonight on the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage by traditional Irish musicians Billy McCominskey, Zan McLeon and Jim Eagan. Free, 6 p.m. >> Three Stars alums The Beanstalk Library are playing the Black Cat's backstage, with John Wayne Hero. 9 p.m., $8. >> It's a little......

The annual visit of the Mariinsky Theater's traveling opera troupe from St. Petersburg came a little early this year. The themes that unite the Kennedy Center double-bill of Verdi's Otello and Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades are self-destructive obsessions and tenor heroes who become villains. Who better to perform The Queen of Spades than the Mariinsky Theater, which hosted the world premiere of The Queen of Spades on December 19, 1890? The opera is thoroughly Russian,......

FRIDAY: >> Bay Area songstress Goapele’s (pictured) musical background is almost as diverse as her ethnic background. Born to a South African political exile father and a mother whose parents survived the Holocaust, she studied at the Berklee College of Music and later would form musical partnerships with the likes of hip-hop acts like the Hieroglyphics crew and E-40. However her 2005 release, Change It All, established her as especially talented when it comes to......

French pianist Alain Planès has made good (and sometimes great) recordings of everything he played on his Sunday recital (see my recent review of the conclusion of his complete Debussy set). The event was sponsored by the Foundation for Advanced Education in the Sciences, as the third concert of what is, regrettably, its last season of concerts presented off the campus of the National Institutes of Health. In an unforgettable juxtaposition, the early start time......

FRIDAY: >> Ted Leo and the Pharmacists are at the 9:30 Club with Kristeen Young and Partyline, $15, 9 p.m. Also Saturday with Kristeen Young and Ris Paul Ric. >> DC9's Liberation Dance Party hosts Brooklyn's Jaguar Club. $6, 9 p.m. SATURDAY: >> The Historic Sixth and I Synagogue hosts The Eight, D.C.'s part of a "worldwide Hannukah party" featuring the LeeVees, DeLeon and D.C.'s own Black and White JohnsonsJacksons. $12/$18, all ages, 9 p.m.......

For dance lovers looking to get into the holiday spirit, The Nutcracker is a must at this time of year. Thankfully, the Washington D.C. area has numerous performances of the beloved ballet from which to choose. While there’s over a dozen performances ranging in size from huge ballet troupes to small dance studios, here's a few that stand out among the rest. American Ballet Theater: Few companies can compete with the size and talents of......

There are no shortage of Dickensian options for D.C. theatergoers, from the traditional Ford's production to the indulgent Arena Staging, set in 1941. The innovative RussianGeorgian-influenced dance-inspired theater company Synetic has thrown its hat into the ring, and the results are worth seeing, if not as unique as one might expect. Given its history of wildly divergent takes on popular classics, it's a bit of a surprise that this Christmas Carol, in many ways, is......

FRIDAY: >>Great quadruple bill comes to the Rock and Roll Hotel: Three Stars alums Jukebox the Ghost (pictured right) and tour diarists These United States join DCist fave Ra Ra Riot and Sam Champion. All that for the low, low price of $10 before, $12 at the door. Show 9 p.m. >> The Black Cat once again hosts Cryfest, everyone's favorite dance party that pits The Smiths vs. The Cure, brought to you by DJs......