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      Lil Uzi Vert Gave the Eagles the Soundtrack to Their Season

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      Eagles players ran out onto the field to the Philadelphia rapper’s “Just Wanna Rock,” and they regularly celebrate with the song’s viral dance.PHOENIX — Like all N.F.L. teams, the Eagles employ many exceptionally large men. But as they left their locker room ahead of the N.F.C. championship game against the San Francisco 49ers, they were led by a musician who stands just 5-foot-4.The artist, clad in a midnight-green No. 16 Eagles jersey and diamond chains, was the rapper Lil Uzi Vert, who ran out with the group as “Just Wanna Rock” blared through the stadium. Uzi’s song, which has a viral hip-shaking dance to go with it, has become the soundtrack for the Eagles’ season.“That song got the city and the world buzzing,” Eagles linebacker Kyzir White said. “That feel like our anthem right now.”Uzi, who uses they/they pronouns, said in a recent interview that the response to the track “was like a dream come true.”The rapper, a native of Philadelphia, noted that it was gratifying to discover their fan base is “actually bigger than what I think,” adding, “I didn’t think that they really listened to me.”Dive Deeper Into Super Bowl LVIIThe God of Sod: George Toma, 94, has been a groundskeeper for all 57 Super Bowls. On Sunday, his perfectionism will be on display for millions of people who will have no idea who he is or how he suffers for his work.Philadelphia Swagger: After surviving a disastrous introductory news conference, an ill-chosen flower analogy and his “Beat Dallas” motivational shirt, Nick Sirianni has transformed the Eagles, and maybe himself.Inside a Kansas City Oasis: Big Charlie’s Saloon is a South Philadelphia bar with a bit of a conundrum: how to celebrate Kansas City’s Super Bowl berth without drawing the ire of locals.Halftime Show: The nearly four-year gap between Rihanna’s live performances will close when she takes the stage at the Super Bowl. During her hiatus, the stakes for her return have only grown.The up-tempo “Just Wanna Rock,” inspired by Jersey club music, doesn’t feature many lyrics. But its dance exploded on TikTok, and has evolved to include different variations. At its core, dancers shake their hips and move their arms while looking at a camera with a stoic facial expression.When running back Miles Sanders scored the Eagles’ first touchdown in the N.F.C. championship game, he celebrated with the dance; he was joined by center Jason Kelce, who looked more like he was trying to shake an insect off his back. “They still got some learning to do,” Uzi said, laughing.“That was the first time releasing that,” Kelce said with a smile. “I just felt it in the moment.”The song plays regularly in the Eagles’ locker room, White said. Often at the center of the dance circle is defensive lineman Jordan Davis, who stands at an imposing 6-foot-6 and 335 pounds. His moves always surprise his teammates because of his size.“He wants to dance all day,” White said. “Weight room, locker room, it don’t matter, he always hitting that.”Even Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts, known for his love for old-school R&B tunes, has gotten behind “Just Wanna Rock.” When Uzi met Hurts in the locker room ahead of the N.F.C. championship game, the rapper remembers Hurts saying that the song was “crazy” — in a good way. Uzi said Hurts’s stamp of approval meant that much more because the song is so different from the player’s standard playlist. (After the Eagles ran out with Uzi before their game against the 49ers, Hurts’s favorite artist, Anita Baker, sang the national anthem.)Lil Uzi Vert performing last month in New York.Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images For SiriusXMDuring the Eagles’ 2017 Super Bowl-winning season, the team leaned on the song “Dreams and Nightmares” by the rapper Meek Mill. Eagles players danced and rapped the song word for word before blowing out the Vikings in the N.F.C. championship game. Players said that track is still in heavy rotation, and Mill performed it ahead of the Eagles’ game against the Cowboys in Week 6.“Dreams and Nightmares” has long been considered something of a city anthem, but the popularity of “Just Wanna Rock” has sparked a debate within the Eagles’ locker room.“I like the ‘Just Wanna Rock’ dance, but I like ‘Dreams and Nightmares’ more,” Eagles cornerback Darius Slay said. “I like both of ’em, but the new generation now moved from jumping around. Now they want to dance.”Uzi is hoping the Eagles can help the song lead to change in their city, which has dealt with a recent increase in violent crime. While the dancing is all for fun, Uzi suggested that perhaps people in Philadelphia watching popular Eagles players busting out moves will inspire them to seek positive outlets for their energy.“We from a rough area, and the only thing that gets praised is negative things, and this is a positive thing,” Uzi said, adding: “You would rather be in the house perfecting the dance and doing videos instead of going outside doing something that’s not positive. Why not just keep doing it to make sure that everyone’s safe?”The Eagles haven’t yet asked Uzi to run out with them on Sunday, the musician said. But the rapper will be at the game, and it’s almost certain that players will be shaking their hips in celebrations. More

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      What an ’80s Feeling: ‘Flashdance' Turns 40

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      The film helped bring breaking into the mainstream. Over the years, it also became famous for the subs and doubles of its star, Jennifer Beals.At the climax of a strip routine, a young woman in silhouette arches back across a chair and pulls a cord. A cascade of water drenches her flexed body.In a leotard and leg warmers, the same woman stretches and runs in place, her wet hair flinging moisture as she shakes and rolls her head.Still in the leotard and leg warmers, she faces a panel of judges at an audition— jog-skipping while pumping her arms high, turning and turning, diving into a somersault, spinning her on back.These and other moments from the 1983 movie “Flashdance” still circulate in cultural memory, loved and mocked and recognized, even by people who never saw the film. On Monday, in honor of its 40th anniversary, New Yorkers get a rare chance to watch it on a big screen, as the closing selection of this year’s Dance on Camera Festival at Film at Lincoln Center. Get ready to cheer or jeer.Jennifer Beals, the star of “Flashdance,” in the off-the-shoulder sweatshirt she made famous.Everett Collection“So many people hold it in a special place,” Michael Trusnovec, a curator of the festival, said, noting how the movie’s style permeated the Long Island dance studios that he grew up in. He also pointed to how “Flashdance” had affected fashion: the sweatshirts with the neck hole cut to fall off one shoulder. And he stressed how dancers, including those inspired by the brief appearance of B-boys, had gravitated to the movie, thinking: “That’s what I want to do. I want to be that.”Beyond dance, much of the movie’s staying power comes from the soundtrack, especially Michael Sembello’s “Maniac” and Giorgio Moroder’s “What a Feeling,” sung by Irene Cara. The songs support sequences that are essentially music videos, which is how those scenes (the jogging workout, the audition) became ubiquitous on MTV — and why they still circulate online. Cara’s voice connects “Flashdance” to “Fame,” the 1980 movie with her hit title song, just as the supporting actress Cynthia Rhodes connects it to “Dirty Dancing,” from 1987. It’s an ’80s dance-film node.Beals in the movie’s freak-out scene.Paramount Pictures, via Getty ImagesThere’s some fondness for the plot, too. Set in Pittsburgh, it’s a follow-your-dreams story and a Cinderella tale. Alex — Jennifer Beals in the role that made her a star — is a welder by day and dances in a burlesque club at night (occasioning not just the famous water-drenched number but also a freak-out in white Kabuki makeup amid strobe lights). Her dream is to be accepted into a prestigious dance conservatory. By the end, she gets in, and she gets the guy, her older boss at the steel mill.Over the years, the film has acquired a kind of notoriety, too, because Beals did so little of Alex’s dancing. Most was performed by a French dancer, Marine Jahan. And in the climactic audition scene, there were more doubles: the gymnast Sharon Shapiro for the dive into the roll; and for the backspin, the 16-year-old B-boy Richard Colon, better known as Crazy Legs.Richard Colon, better known as Crazy Legs, doubling for Beals.Paramount Pictures, via Getty ImagesInitially, Colon said in an interview, he was brought in to teach the other doubles — on the day before shooting. That wasn’t enough time, so the director, Adrian Lyne, asked him to perform the backspin himself, in a leotard and wig, after shaving his legs and his newly grown mustache.“I was this little arrogant Puerto Rican from the Bronx with all this machismo,” Colon said. “I put my hands up to Lyne’s face and rubbed my fingers together, like, ‘You gotta pay me.’”They paid enough, Colon said. And in the next decades, the residual checks “definitely came in handy,” he added, as did his joke about being the first in hip-hop to dress in drag.Colon was known to the filmmakers because he was already in the movie. He and a few other members of the pioneering B-boy group Rock Steady Crew appear in another scene, when Alex discovers them dancing with a boombox on the sidewalk.To the B-boy anthem “It’s Just Begun” by the Jimmy Castor Bunch, Normski pops and locks like a windup robot, Ken Swift and Crazy Legs spin on their backs and Mr. Freeze holds an umbrella while doing the backslide, just before Michael Jackson made that decades-old move famous as the Moonwalk. This one-minute sequence had an outsized impact.“It’s impossible to overestimate the significance of ‘Flashdance’ in the history of breaking,” said Joseph Schloss, the author of “Foundation: B-boys, B-girls and Hip-Hop Culture in New York.” “That one scene pretty much single-handedly brought breaking into the mainstream.”Some members of Rock Steady were at first hesitant to be in the movie. “We didn’t practice with other groups,” Colon said, “because it was all about the element of surprise.” Marc Lemberger, better known as Mr. Freeze, said he was afraid that other dancers would “bite our moves”— steal them.A scene from “Flashdance.”Parmount PicturesAfter the movie’s release, the crew “became instant ghetto celebrities,” Colon said. “There was lots of love and lots of jealousy.” They got on the David Letterman show and into “Beat Street,” one of a few breaking-themed movies that came out the next year. “Flashdance” is connected to that part of the ’80s, too.The Hollywood interest was a quick fad, but breaking lived on. For decades, Colon said, he would meet people who sneaked into “Flashdance” just to see that one scene, people who saw themselves in the dance, many of them far from the Bronx.“When you talk to people in different hip-hop dance scenes around the world,” Schloss said, “almost inevitably they will say, ‘Well, the first time we saw it was in ‘Flashdance.’”In “Planet B-boy,” a 2008 documentary focused on the international B-boy competition Battle of the Year, dancers from Japan, Germany and France all testify to that effect. (And where did the director of the film, Benson Lee, get idea for the documentary? From rewatching “Flashdance” and wondering what had happened to the form.)The ripples from the scene can also be felt in “Top Nine,” a new documentary getting its world premiere at Dance on Camera just before “Flashdance.” It’s about the Russian B-boy crew Top 9, formed around 20 years ago.Its members tell their story of banding together, improving their skills and gaining global respect for Russian B-boys. They win Battle of Year in 2008, beating a dominant Korean crew. That glory doesn’t solve their money problems — this isn’t a “Flashdance” fairy tale — but they keep dancing.Through it all, they don’t mention “Flashdance,” but listen to the song they use to win in 2008: “It’s Just Begun.” And when some of them start a festival in St. Petersburg, which masters do they import? Ken Swift and Crazy Legs. More

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      Annie Mac’s Before Midnight: A Dance Party With an Early Bedtime

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      The Before Midnight parties promise all the thrills of a hedonistic night out, but with a respectable finish time for older dance music fans.It was Friday night, in a 2,000-person capacity nightclub in London, and the dance floor was packed. A heavy-duty sound system pounded out house music and a huge disco ball turned overhead. Only one thing was off: It was 9.30 p.m.A woman in the crowd gleefully yelled to the throng of people around her: “I’m 15 weeks postpartum and I’m in the club!”The party, called Before Midnight, is organized by the Irish D.J. Annie Macmanus, who plays under the name Annie Mac: It promises all the thrills of a club — just with an early bedtime. Starting at 7 p.m. and wrapped up by 12, Before Midnight is one of several recent variations on the hedonistic all-night sessions in which dance music is usually enjoyed, aimed at older fans juggling children and careers.“There’s an inherent belief that clubbing is for young people,” Macmanus said recently by phone. “There’s now a generation of people who experienced clubbing in its most popular guise, and still want to do that, but don’t feel like they belong there anymore.”Macmanus explained that Before Midnight was born out of her desire to fit a music career around her duties as a mother of two children, ages 6 and 9. Late-night D.J. sets didn’t mix well with their weekend activities, she said.“It felt like I had jet lag,” Macmanus said. “It just wasn’t accommodating for where I’m at in my life right now.”Annie Macmanus, who D.J.s as Annie Mac. Before setting up Before Midnight, she fronted BBC radio’s flagship dance music show.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesMacmanus said this reckoning coincided with her decision, in 2021, to stand down as the presenter of the BBC’s flagship dance music show, on BBC Radio 1 — a gig she had held for 17 years and which cemented her name as a musical tastemaker in Britain.Before Midnight was her next act, she said, a fresh project to restore some work-life balance. The premise was simple, she added: “a definitive club night that’s just like a normal one, only earlier.”The first night, held last year at the Islington Assembly Hall, a London music venue, was a one-off experiment. It sold out, and, at the end of last year, Macmanus announced a 10-date Before Midnight tour of Britain and Ireland. The tour’s two remaining London dates are also taking place at Outernet, a new, subterranean nightclub in the city’s West End that is the largest live events space built in central London since the 1940s.Before Midnight is particularly popular with women, who Macmanus estimated make up about 75 percent of the crowd. Jodie Brooks, 44, who has attended every Before Midnight party in London to date, was in the crowd this past Friday. “I just didn’t want the night to start at 1 a.m. anymore,” Brooks, who works in advertising and like Macmanus has two children age 6 and 9, said later by phone. “I never wanted parenthood to change me in that way, but, inevitably, it just does. You have to get up and do the Saturday-morning football practice at 9 a.m.,” she said.The coronavirus lockdowns of 2022 and 2021, which took clubbing temporarily out of the mix, made many people in their 30s and 40s re-evaluate how they wanted to spend their weekends. Some, like Brooks, emerged determined to get back on the dance floor, but on new, more wholesome terms. With Before Midnight, she said, “You can go for a really lush dinner at six. By eight you’re in the club,” and “by 12 you’re out.”Before Midnight is particularly popular with women, who Macmanus estimated make up about 75 percent of the crowd.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesOthers realized that they liked dance music, but not nightclubs. Adem Holness, who leads the contemporary music program at the Southbank Center, a central London arts venue, said that many of the venue’s offerings suited electronic music enthusiasts at a more mature life stage: Performances are seated, and finish in time to catch the last Tube home.“We have a menu of different options for people,” he said. “It’s about making the model work for all kinds of people.”In the last year, D.J.s and dance music performers including Fabio & Grooverider, Erykah Badu and Peaches have all played gigs at the Royal Festival Hall, a concert hall managed by the Southbank. “I’m seeing people wanting to experience really great music that you might think or assume belongs in a club, somewhere else, or in a different way,” Holness said.Before Midnight’s London dates are at Outernet, a new, subterranean nightclub in the city’s West End.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesUpcoming parties are scheduled for Manchester in northern England, Glasgow and Dublin, among other cities.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesBefore Midnight was also influenced by the experience of bringing club culture into a more rarefied space, Macmanus said. In 2019, she recalled, she played in New York at MoMa PS1’s Warm Up, the art museum’s summer series that sets experimental and electronic music alongside contemporary art and design. There, she saw a multigenerational audience dancing together, she said. “It had a big effect on me as a D.J.,” she added. “I’m always going to try and reach that type of a dance floor.”The Before Midnight concept was simple, Macmanus said: “a definitive club night that’s just like a normal one, only earlier.”Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesMacmanus added that an early-starting dance party wasn’t a totally original idea. Tim Lawrence, a professor of cultural studies at the University of East London who researches nightlife has been running a monthly London dance party that starts at 5 p.m. since 2018; in an interview, he said that events like Before Midnight were a way to “pluralize the culture.” During a 2017 tour of the United States to promote his book “Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor,” Lawrence recalled, he attended an invite-only party in New York called Joy that started around dinnertime.Lawrence brought the concept back to London with him and co-founded his monthly dance party called All Our Friends. “It’s about confounding certain ideas that come with the all-night or late-night thing,” Lawrence said. The earlier timetable allows for a different approach to dancing, he said, which can “potentially be more expressive, more interactive and go a bit deeper on a social level.”But for Brooks, the advertising worker, the appeal of Before Midnight was much simpler: It was an opportunity to dance to the music that she loves, in a club like any other, and be home in time for bed.“You get all the joy and the love,” she said. “You get to be a part of something again. And you don’t feel out of place.”Confetti released just before midnight signaled the party was almost over.Lauren Fleishman for The New York Times More

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      Review: From Lil Buck, History and a Chance to Flash Some Brilliance

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      “Memphis Jookin’: The Show,” which presents jookin “in the world it comes from,” is sincere entertainment, packed with talent and heart.“This is going to be very educational for a lot of y’all,” Lil Buck said at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater on Thursday.He was speaking before the New York premiere of “Memphis Jookin’: The Show,” which he conceived, produced, helped choreograph and stars in.Buck, also known as Charles Riley, is the biggest star of jookin, the Memphis-born street dance. He’s probably the only jookin specialist that most people have heard of. And because of how Buck became famous — dancing to classical music, collaborating with Yo-Yo Ma and ballet companies — many of those people might have misconceptions about the dance.Hence this show, which seeks, in Buck’s words, to present jookin “in the world it comes from.” And to do so in the form of a 90-minute, touring theatrical production, with a plot and dialogue. Such street-to-stage transpositions can, and usually do, go wrong in a hundred ways. With more skill and care than originality, “Memphis Jookin’” mainly avoids the pitfalls. It’s sincere entertainment, packed with talent and heart. And, yes, it’s educational, too.The story, serviceably if sometimes clunkily written by Ameenah Kaplan and Malcolm Barrett, follows JJ (the manic Dai’Vian Washington), a Memphis kid who decides to document the jookin scene with his dad’s camcorder. He goes to the Crystal Palace roller rink — an important location in jookin history and Buck’s biography — where his friend DJ Fly (Bradley Davis) is on the turntables. There we see a loosely staged scene of jookin in situ: little bursts of dancing that sometimes flare up into fights.This narrative setup also allows DJ Fly to give JJ (and us) a history lesson about the development of the underground hip-hop music that goes with jookin (ably supplied by Marshall and Parker Mulherin and Young Jai). As he explains how changing technology allowed DJs to play with speed and rhythm, the lessons are illustrated with dancing that enjoyably demonstrates parallel development.Throughout the show, the choreography (by Buck, Terran Noir Gary and Marico Flake) and the direction (by Amy Campion) work together to make points, flash some brilliance and keep things moving. A dance battle escalates into a generational confrontation when Buck arrives like a new-kid-in-town gunslinger to challenge the old-school champ Double OG (Flake, well known in urban dance circles as Dr. Rico).It’s a smart use of the always affable Buck, acknowledging that his dancing is on another level. The otherworldly gliding in sneakers, the toe-tip balances that splay riskily and recover: He effortlessly pushes everything a little further. Double OG (a gruffly witty dancer who seems to be gracefully scraping schmutz from his shoes) admits defeat by resorting to violence. JJ and DJ Fly have to restore the peace.Lil Buck in “Memphis Jookin,’” which he conceived, produced, helped choreograph and stars in.Andrea Mohin/The New York TimesThis narrative turn is typical of the show’s dramaturgy, obvious but effective. JJ brings everyone together by showing them what he has recorded on his camera, scenes now danced by cast members as others pretend to watch the camcorder playback. What might have seemed like nothing much when we saw JJ filming the first Crystal Palace scene is now revealed, with some fast forwarding, to be quite wonderful: a trio of whiz kids, a boy-girl romance. We see Double OG teaching another cast member, Cameron Sykes, the basics of jookin, starting with the foundational gangsta walk, and Sykes manages the trick of pretending to be clumsy so he can transform into a marvel.Then JJ’s camera and the documentary premise pay off again, this time with interviews. On the rear wall, we see video of one of the dancers (well edited by Joe Mulherin), telling his or her story, while onstage that dancer expresses the story through jookin. Elise Landrum sweetly explains how dance is therapy, how it’s kept her sane. Dra’em Hines talks about learning to dance from his father and how the other cast members supported him when his father died.Buck tells some of his story, too, acting out his inspirations, including Crystal Palace dancers and Michael Jackson. The crux of his tale is a crisis, when a mentor told him that his dancing was “cool but not gangsta enough.” What he learned, he says, is that jookin wasn’t about skills and tricks; it was about expressing pain, love, joy, who you are.His aspiration, he adds, is for people to recognize jookin as a “fine art.” The dancing — not just his, but everyone’s — makes its own case: inventive, expressive, impressive, hard-won. But the narrative points to goals other than respect or prestige. At the end, JJ uploads his footage to YouTube and watches in astonished triumph as his views and subscribers rocket into the millions.During the post-show discussion, Flake was more frank about the show’s purpose — saying, in effect, that yes, jookin is art but artists need money. Landrum, in her interview segment, expressed delight in “getting paid to do what I like.” What these dancers need is a way to be professional without being Lil Buck. And this show that Lil Buck has made for and with them and taken on tour could be the answer.Memphis Jookin’: The ShowThrough Friday at the Rose Theater, Lincoln Center; lincolncenter.org. More

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      “The White Lotus” Dance Remix is the Hottest Club Song

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      Variations of the spine-tingling intro music have played at rave parties, Australian music festivals and Sundance.On a recent club night in Chicago, a high-pitched woman’s voice that sounded like a gobbling turkey — dropping acid — brought everyone to the dance floor. Some people swayed, twisting their hips and twirling their hair in a hypnotic lock step. Others pumped their fists and jumped up and down. One woman let out a high-pitched scream, as though she’d just spotted Chris Hemsworth at the grocery store.The tune was the EDM dance remix of “Renaissance (Main Title Theme),” the wordless title music that plays over the opening credits of Season 2 of “The White Lotus,” the hit HBO Max series about a group of wealthy people who vacation at the luxury resort — and the people who serve them.Since the second season, set in Sicily, began in late October, remixes of the oscillating harp notes, written by the Chilean Canadian composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer, have spread across TikTok, SoundCloud and in the EDM community. Remixes are now playing in clubs and at music festivals. Last weekend, at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, Diplo unveiled his own mix at 1:30 a.m. “Renaissance” is a variation on the series’s Season 1 theme, “Aloha! — Main Title Theme,” also by Mr. Tapia de Veer,  which features drums and bird songs (that season was set in Maui) and won an Emmy for best original main title theme music. “Aloha” had the same choppy melody, though it did not take off on TikTok or spawn a club following like “Renaissance.”What’s different about Mr. Tapia de Veer’s new beat? Here’s how the song became a crowd-pleasing anthem.Wait, doesn’t everyone nowadays just skip past a show’s theme song?Aah, the “skip intro” button debate. When it’s the intro song to “The Big Bang Theory?” Yes. When the composer has won an Emmy? Your loss.When did the song take off on TikTok?After the first episode of the new season dropped Oct. 30, someone realized: The high-pitched yodeling was danceable. And unlike the Season 1 variation, “Renaissance” climaxes to a throbbing EDM beat near the one-minute mark (the entire song runs 1 minute and 38 seconds long).Over the next few months, thousands of videos flooded the platform, with users setting the ethereal earworm to their own kooky dance moves, frying eggs and lawn manicuring.Why can’t I get it out of my head?Edward Venn, a professor of music at Leeds University in England, broke it down for British GQ in the fall: “It’s the way that the initial minor chord moves to the major — offering a sense of hope, of respite — only for it to slide back, continually and unstoppably, to the threatening implications of that minor chord,” he said.So how did it get into clubs?For weeks, Twitter, TikTok and Instagram users have been sharing videos of partygoers dancing ecstatically as the twisted operatic notes soar through basement bars and packed clubs.The rapper and “Euphoria” star Dominic Fike closed a set at the Terminal 5 music venue in Manhattan with the eerie melody in December, the latest instance of a tune from TV becoming a party staple (we see you, Wednesday Addams and your jerky, infectious “Goo Goo Muck” dance).Where else has it shown up?It turns out that the operatic discothèque sound bath — punctuated by human screeches — works just as well on a large scale as a small one. The Killers opened several stadium shows in December with the song.Days before the show’s finale, a music festival in Australia played the song, to which many in the crowd of thousands of bucket-hatted and fanny-packed revelers tried to vocalize — erm, sing? — along.A heart-pounding remix of the ululating anthem even made an appearance at the end of a “Saturday Night Live” skit last weekend, played by another pop culture phenom: the killer robot doll M3gan, the newly minted camp horror icon with some dance moves of her own.What are some of the best remixes?One popular mash-up features Jennifer Coolidge and her meme-ready rant: “Please, these gays. They’re trying to murder me.”  Another, unveiled by the Dutch DJ Tiësto at a Miami Beach club on New Year’s Eve, makes you want to bang your head until you can’t feel your face. And there is a luscious tech house beat by Westend that will have your stereo shaking.“It captured the feral nature that’s inside all of us and that especially comes out on the dance floor,” said Tyler Morris, a New York-based DJ and music producer who spins under the name Westend. “Every time I play it in my DJ sets, it’s a showstopper.”How do you dance to it?Fist pumps, waving arms and synchronized — or not — flailing limbs, seem to be popular. The robot — or even a fast-moving zombie imitation à la “The Last of Us” — might work well here.Any word on the theme music for Season 3?While the show has been renewed for a third season, there’s no word yet on the next resort destination. The only thing that might be more popular than the EDM “Renaissance”? A K-pop version. More

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      Justin Peck’s New Americana, ‘Copland Dance Episodes’

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      “Right now you’re dancing on top of or ahead of the music,” Justin Peck told members of New York City Ballet during a recent rehearsal. As the pianist Craig Baldwin played the gently accumulating “Simple Gifts” section of Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” Peck added: “Here, you should be riding the wave of the music. It’s like surfing on a longboard.”It wasn’t the only time Peck, City Ballet’s resident choreographer, spoke in metaphors while preparing “Copland Dance Episodes,” which premieres on Thursday at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. And it wasn’t the only time he encouraged dancers to match the plain-spoken spareness of the music. “It has to have the ease,” he said at one point, “of a tumbleweed blowing.”Peck, seated center, discussing “Copland Dance Episodes,” with his some of his creative team, clockwise from left Brandon Stirling Baker, Gonzalo Garcia, Craig Hall, Craig Salstein and Patricia Delgado.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesThese dancers are somewhat familiar with Copland; Peck’s exhilaratingly athletic “Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes,” from 2015, is one of his most beloved ballets. Yet the premiere on Thursday — an evening-length whirlwind that includes a version of his “Rodeo” but is also set to “Fanfare for the Common Man,” “Appalachian Spring” and “Billy the Kid” — will be a milestone on multiple fronts.To start, “Copland Dance Episodes” will be the company’s first evening-length, plotless work since George Balanchine’s “Jewels,” from 1967, and the first evening-length one for Peck, period; above all, for the artists involved, it will be the first time Copland’s three ballet scores, among the finest American music written in the genre, will be under City Ballet’s roof.“One of the things I noticed early on when I was making work at New York City Ballet is that there’s no Copland in the rep here,” Peck said in an interview. “That just felt like such a weird thing for this incredible American institution.”For his part, Andrew Litton, City Ballet’s music director, thrilled to be taking up the Copland scores. “It’s been an omission,” he said. “The saying was that he invented the sound of American music. He certainly invented the sound of the West, which has been copied by hundreds of film composers since.”Peck referred to Copland’s ballet output as “music that we all don’t realize we know, but we know”: the breakneck “Hoe-Down” from “Rodeo,” the symphonic elevation of “Simple Gifts” in “Appalachian Spring.”Peck demonstrates a move for his dancers. “It has to have the ease,” he said at one point in rehearsals, “of a tumbleweed blowing.”Jonathan Fahoury.“There’s a lot that can be culturally associated with it, especially the Western cowboy feel of it, which I’m not leaning into at all,” Peck added. “I was a little nervous about that at first, but had to sort of remind myself that this music was written by this Jewish gay guy from Brooklyn who had never been out West.”Several years before creating “Rodeo,” Peck saw Agnes de Mille’s original choreography at American Ballet Theater. He sat close to the orchestra, and although he enjoyed the dance, he was more struck by the score. “I could really feel it in a physical sense, rather than just using my ears and hearing it,” he said. “I kept thinking about the music, and then eventually, I had this thought that maybe there’s room for another interpretation.”Where de Mille’s dance is theatrical, Peck’s “Rodeo” is abstract, stripped down to a neutral scenic design and placeless costumes. In a playful turn, it’s also pronounced “ROH-dee-oh” instead of the traditional “roh-DAY-oh.” Jonathan Fahoury, a member of the corps de ballet said that Peck’s ballet is one of his favorites to perform, adding that it’s free of affect or ornament: “What you see is what you get.”Ashley Hod, left, and Christina Clark. “Copland Dance Episodes” builds on Peck’s “Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes,” from 2015.“Rodeo,” Fahoury also said, is like a single idea that has now been expanded for “Copland Dance Episodes.” Peck used a similar comparison: “Making it was like making a pilot episode. That was proof of concept, and now what’s the rest of the season like? How do we take these character arcs even further through this abstract space, then tie it all up?”The works Peck is using, composed between 1938 and 1944, have had a standard-setting effect on American sound, with the incorporation of cowboy songs and folk music. And they exemplify what has been seen as a national style of straightforward modesty. Transparent and uncomplicated by dense counterpoint, Copland’s music from this time all but defies interpretation, and punishingly exposes players who deviate from its directions; the composer Ned Rorem once described it as having “never a note too many.”Onstage, the story ballets were distinct: “Billy the Kid” was written at the urging of Lincoln Kirstein for Ballet Caravan, a precursor to City Ballet; “Rodeo,” for de Mille; and “Appalachian Spring,” for Martha Graham. Yet they are, Peck said, “cut from the same cloth.”“Never a note too many”: Mckenzie Bernardino Soares, foreground, and fellow City Ballet dancers rehearse to Copland.That’s an argument borne out in the juxtapositions of “Copland Dance Episodes.” The opening “Fanfare” — as simple as can be, in the key of C and in common time — leads without friction into the brassy “Buckaroo Holiday” of “Rodeo,” which is in the same key, with the same number of beats per measure. Copland’s signature expansiveness, rendered with fifth intervals, opens the “Saturday Night Waltz” and returns later in “Billy the Kid.” And “Hoe-Down” ends with three emphatic sforzando notes that flow without a pause in Peck’s dance into three soft ones, in a logical key change, at the start of “Appalachian Spring.”Throughout, Litton said, the music remains at a “human” scale. That word has also often been applied to Peck’s choreography, particularly for groups. Another word that tends to come up when speaking with his City Ballet colleagues is “musical.”Litton described Peck’s relationship with the scores as “emotion based,” clearly responding to the notes with choreography that “always fits.” And Ellen Warren, a former dancer with the company who is designing the costumes for “Copland Dance Episodes,” said that seeing Peck at work “almost feels like a game between the movement and the music.”Peck, center, demonstrating to his dancers. Andrew Litton, City Ballet’s music director, described Peck’s relation to scores as “emotion-based.”Peck grew up playing piano, and continued with it while at the School of American Ballet. There, he took part in a music program led by Jeffrey Middleton. Eventually, Peck, who had long believed that dancers are musicians — especially tap dancers like Savion Glover — could interpret a score with confidence, and write piano works for himself.“Copland Dance Episodes” has been in development since soon after “Rodeo” premiered. After studying the scores and responding to them with movement, Peck mapped out the choreography as if it were a series. He said that the process of building it was closer to his work on Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” film than to his other ballets.“What I’m aiming to do is to get the viewer to break down the idea of, this is like a trilogy of some sort,” he said. “It’s not a trilogy. It’s sort of taking liberty by colliding all this music and immersing ourselves in the spell of it, and finding these pockets of interaction or of little anecdotes or of pure dance so that they can find the world of it in a new way.”The dancers in rehearsal. “It’s not a trilogy,” Peck said of “Copland Dance Episodes.” “It’s sort of taking liberty by colliding all this music and immersing ourselves in the spell of it.”Miriam Miller, a City Ballet soloist, said “Copland Dance Episodes” is “a nonnarrative ballet, but there are emotions and narrative within it.” There are couples who recur throughout, but the work, after the “Fanfare” introduction, begins with a version of Peck’s “Rodeo,” which was made for an ensemble of 15 male dancers (and one woman); and then, in “Appalachian Spring,” the casting is inverted, with a group of 15 female dancers on pointe. Near the end of that section, Peck said, the groups are combined “almost like peanut butter and jelly, then the third act, ‘Billy the Kid,’ brings these two worlds together and collides them.”This work is Peck’s 30th premiere with the lighting designer Brandon Stirling Baker, who said that in creating a scheme, he began with the music. “I listen for color,” he said. “And Aaron Copland is the most colorful composer you can think of. It can be many things — rowdy, epic, sensitive, serene.”Ultimately, he and Peck decided that the color should come from the score and the dancers, not from the light. “It’s going to all be light that we see in the real world,” Baker said. “It’s very honest, and the work can speak for itself. I thought about ‘Simple Gifts’: ‘’Tis a gift to be simple.’”Peck, left, with Aaron Sanz, said that the process of building “Copland Dance Episodes” was closer to his work on Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” film than to his other ballets.Much tone comes as well from the set, by the artist Jeffrey Gibson, whose work Peck saw in his exhibition “Like a Hammer” at the Denver Art Museum in 2018. Gibson’s style, which incorporates craft and camp in mixed media, with inspiration from his Choctaw and Cherokee heritage, is as fervently American as Copland’s music.“For me, listening to the music was a little complicated,” Gibson said. “It is Americana from a time of strife for Native American people.” But he and Peck also wanted their collaboration to put forward a vision for unity. Gibson arrived at a dizzyingly colorful curtain with text running along both sides that reads “the only way out is through” — “a set of words that expressed what a new Americana could be,” he said.The curtain’s look fed that of the costumes. Warren took the more than 100 colors of Gibson’s design and assigned two to each of the 30 dancers in the cast. During “Fanfare,” they are covered in white nylon tulle that Peck described as “the cobwebs of ballet’s past.”“He wants people to see the music in a new way,” Warren said. “They hear ‘Copland’ and they think Western. But the visuals are about dealing with the music in a way that’s truly rooted in America and our culture. All these colors are redefining what it means to be American.” More

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      in Music

      At Rennie Harris’s Hip-Hop University, Teaching the Teachers

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      On a Friday morning in December the hip-hop choreographer Rennie Harris was in Boulder, Colo., teaching a master class. Rather than taking a post at the front of the studio and staying there, Harris moved among the students, weaving his way through the room and dancing along with them. He offered a few critiques, but more often he paused to share stories and historical tidbits, illuminating the lineage and theory behind the movements he was teaching.But this was more than just a master class. It was one of the final sessions in a yearlong program to train and certify hip-hop and street dance teachers. A few days later, most of these students became members of the first graduating class at the newly minted Rennie Harris University.Over the course of his decades-long career, Harris, who turns 59 this week, has been a guiding force, ushering hip-hop and street dance into new spaces and championing their history and legacy. He is perhaps most widely known for bringing these styles to the concert stage with his Philadelphia-based company Rennie Harris Puremovement. (The company will present its signature work, “Rome & Jewels,” a retelling of “Romeo and Juliet,” at the Joyce Theater in New York in February.) Rennie Harris University builds on the principles that have shaped its founder’s career, bringing them into the classroom.“No one’s teaching how to teach hip-hop, everyone’s just teaching people how to do it,” said Harris, here in Boulder for his program’s winter cypher session.Stephen Speranza“What’s special, I think, about the curriculum is the pedagogy piece,” Harris said in an interview. “Because no one’s teaching how to teach hip-hop, everyone’s just teaching people how to do it. It’s the assumption that because you can do it, then you can teach it, but everybody doesn’t know how to teach it.”Hip-hop teaching, he said, often focuses largely on learning choreography. Rennie Harris University aims to broaden the scope by giving educators a working knowledge not only of hip-hop technique, but also of its origins and culture. And because hip-hop and other street styles have historically been overlooked in academic settings that teach dance, a program like this one could help place qualified instructors in institutions where these styles have not been offered or prioritized.Farrah McAdam, a member of the first graduating class, said there were additional benefits: “I think this program helps quote, legitimize hip-hop, even though it’s legit as is, right? But we know in education or academic spaces, ballet and modern are seen as a higher priority or a higher foundation of dance than hip-hop or other cultural forms.”In dance programs across the United States, classical ballet and modern are typically part of the core curriculum, while genres like tap, hip-hop and other street styles are often offered as electives — if at all. And while faculty members, dancers and choreographers have grown more vocal about the need for change — especially after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, which brought renewed attention to racial bias in the arts — it has been slow in coming.Farrah McAdam and Tyreis Hunte in B-boy KO’s Popping Combo class in Boulder.Stephen SperanzaFor D. Sabela Grimes, a multidisciplinary artist and associate professor of practice at the Glorya Kaufman School of Dance at the University of Southern California, this phenomenon is part of what he calls the “ballet industrial complex.” Ballet, “at least in the American context, has created pathways for people to have careers as performers,” he said, “and then go into higher education.” But, he added, that has not been the case for hip-hop and street dance teachers.Grimes, an original “Rome & Jewels” cast member, said he was hopeful about the change he is seeing on an institutional level — and that programs like Harris’s would help with the momentum.“I think the program will be a resource,” he said, but “what I have learned working in higher education is that we’re going to need more. Times are changing, which is beautiful, but these institutions don’t move at the same pace that hip-hop culture in a really general sense moves and popular culture also moves.”Harris’s program may be the first of its kind at this level, but similar ones are in the works. Last fall, the British dance company ZooNation rolled out a slate of courses to train hip-hop teachers. And Moncell Durden, a dance scholar, hip-hop figure and a former member of Rennie Harris Puremovement, is developing a teacher certification program in Black American dance as part of his organization, Intangible Roots. It’s slated to begin in the fall, online and with in-person sessions in Los Angeles.The seeds for Rennie Harris University were planted more than 20 years ago, when Harris started Illadelph Legends, a dance festival that gathered hip-hop and street dance pioneers to teach classes and discuss the culture and the history of the forms. Harris said that Durden, who was also involved with the festival, had proposed a partnership with Unesco to create a certification program that would explore hip-hop as a form of traditional folklore. The idea didn’t come to fruition, Harris said, but he couldn’t get it out of his head.Harris presiding at the dance battle at the cypher session in Boulder.Stephen SperanzaHe got to work mining his connections across the dance world, he said, and “called some in favors.” Rennie Harris University welcomed its first pool of applicants in early 2021.The program is structured to allow students to take technique classes locally, with a list of qualified instructors near their homes provided by the school; students also meet virtually to take a rotating slate of courses online. Sessions cover hip-hop and street dance-specific injury prevention, pedagogy, theory and history; Harris’s contribution, a series called The Day Before Hip-Hop, traces the roots of the form back to the period of American slavery. The courses are taught by renowned dance scholars including Ayo Walker, Thomas DeFrantz, Charmaine Warren and Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, and hip-hop and street dance practitioners like Buddha Stretch, Pop Master Fabel and B-boy YNOT.“Most people think that dance is just dance,” said Stephanie Sanchez, a graduate of Rennie Harris University. “And it’s not, it’s so much more than that — it’s research, development, where this move comes from. And that’s exactly what Rennie is doing with this program.”On top of their course load, students attend multiday intensives called cypher sessions, with in-person dance classes and lectures. On the roster for the winter session, held in Boulder in December, were classes like Wake & Break, Tops & Rocks, Popping Combo and Can U Freestyle. (The spring session is in Miami; tuition covers the classes but students pay separate fees for travel, room and board.) The cypher sessions, named for an important hip-hop practice in which dancers (or rappers) gather to perform and cheer one another on — usually in a circle, taking turns in the center — bring students together in a community, a vital part of the Rennie Harris University experience and of hip-hop culture more broadly.To earn their certificates, students are required to pass an extensive slate of assessments. These include teaching a mock class, taking a written test and participating in the cypher-end dance battle, which welcomes dancers from the area and offers a $3,000 grand prize.Warming up before the dance battle.Stephen SperanzaPreparing to pull out their most impressive stunts, the students at the cypher session in December may have been feeling the pressure on the evening of the battle. But a strong sense of unity was the prevailing note. As the judges paused the competition to deliberate after the first round, the competitors fell into a cypher, dancing for — and with — one another as if they’d been dancing together for years.Many Rennie Harris University graduates have taken on Harris’s sense of mission. Tyreis Hunte, a senior at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., said they hoped to bring hip-hop and street dance into the academy in a deeper way, “to educate communities about the history and the integrity of street dance and street culture.”Some are already teaching dance, like McAdam, who works at Sonoma State University in California. She said her experience at Rennie Harris University had deepened her relationship to hip-hop. That it is not only about her teaching, she said, “but also just showing up to jams and battles and spaces, or opening doors for other people to come into the teaching space that might not usually have the access.”For Harris, too, the program is about opening doors. It’s an opportunity to share his knowledge, and also to widen hip-hop and street dance’s circle of influence and help reshape priorities.At Rennie Harris University, where the second cohort has already started classes, “we’re flipping the script,” he said. “Hip-hop dance is first. House dance is first. Street dance is first — that’s the focus, right? Anything else is secondary.” More

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      in Theater

      Review: ‘Drama,’ at the Volksbühne, Contains Many Things. But Drama Isn’t One.

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      The choreographer Constanza Macras’s new work at the Volksbühne is a chaotic revue featuring dance, slapstick, spoken dialogue, pop music and heavy-handed monologues.The last thing the Volksbühne Berlin needs is more drama. That might sound like an odd thing to say about one of Germany’s most important theaters, but in recent years the company seems to have had all the histrionics it can take.It has been struggling to regain its artistic footing after the dismissal of its longtime leader Frank Castorf, in 2017, to make way for Chris Dercon, a tony Belgian impresario who didn’t last through his first season. Then Dercon’s replacement, Klaus Dörr, stepped down before the end of his term, after women in the company raised allegations of sexual harassment.When René Pollesch, one of Germany’s most acclaimed dramatists and a veteran of the Castorf years, was installed as artistic director in 2021, it was widely hoped he would be a purveyor of both stability and artistic excellence. However, Pollesch has struggled to restore the Volksbühne’s reputation as one of the most groundbreaking in Europe.Since Pollesch took the reins, the theater’s program has been a hot mess, with critical pans and poor box office returns. Against this background, it seemed inauspicious that the Argentine choreographer Constanza Macras titled her latest work for the theater “Drama.” The show had its premiere Thursday, and will run in repertory at the theater for the rest of the season.“Drama” is not a straightforward dance piece. Instead, Macras and her 10 performers — drawn from her own company, Dorky Park, plus some guest dancers — serve up a disjointed revue that is about theater itself, in the vaguest of senses. How is it that actors reciting lines written by someone else — often at a remove of centuries or millenniums — can ring true to audiences nowadays? Will they in the future? Using dance, movement — including Buster Keaton-esque slapstick — spoken dialogue and pop music, primarily in English and German, Macras’s intrepid and indefatigable troupe sets out to investigate.In the show’s opening minutes, Macras gives us a potpourri of Shakespearean scenes in a jittery pantomime. Toward the end, we get a three-minute version of Sophocles’s “Antigone.” In between, she treats us to a series of goofy scenarios, including a particularly zany one without dialogue, in which the dancers become life-size Playmobil figures with their helmet-like wigs and stiff limbs.In a zany scene from “Drama,” the players perform jerky movements, dressed as life-size Playmobil figures.Thomas AurinIn that scene, the performers’ controlled, jerky movements are impressive. Elsewhere, the cast display some startling physical feats. The most gob smacking is when the hunky dancer Campbell Caspary walks down a flight of stairs on his hands.The 10 performers that cavort across the large stage pretty much nonstop for two and a half hours are striking dancers, although the results are far more mixed when they are called on to recite texts or sing. With gusto but varying levels of musical skill, they belt out pop anthems backed by two onstage musicians, and when the entire cast launched into “I Sing the Body Electric,” from the 1980s musical “Fame,” joined onstage by a local amateur choir, that gaudy number felt like the show’s grand finale. Alas, we were only halfway through.As the evening wore on, cast members launched into heavy-handed soliloquies about cultural appropriation and artists’ poor pay. (“Dance is so intersectional,” is the worst line in a script with no shortage of clunkers.) Occasional self-deprecating references to the show’s own sloppiness come across as an unconvincing tactic to forestall criticism.From left: Caspary, Bas and Shoji in a musical number from “Drama.”Thomas AurinTaking in the entire spectacle is like following a sloppy brainstorming session through to its illogical conclusion. So why should we be surprised when Macras gives us a late-evening history lesson about Nélida Roca, the Argentine “vedette,” or showgirl, who held Buenos Aires enthralled from the 1950s to the 1970s. The real disappointment is that the burlesque show that follows is curiously low on razzle dazzle, despite all the feather headdresses and tassels.Here, as elsewhere in “Drama,” Macras’ choreography lacks distinction. It was deflating to watch the dancers give their all to exertions that hardly seemed worth the energy.As a chaotic vaudeville featuring dance, music, slapstick and confessional monologues, “Drama” bears more than a passing resemblance to Florentina Holzinger’s “Ophelia’s Got Talent,” a revue featuring an all-naked female dance troupe which is one of the Volksbühne’s only box office hits this season.Macras doesn’t go in for the shock tactics that are Holzinger’s stock in trade, but she still appears to take a page from the younger and more transgressive practitioner of dance theater. There’s even a monologue about suicide that will sound familiar to anyone who has suffered through “Ophelia’s Got Talent.” And although it’s blessedly shorter, “Drama” is similarly meandering, and feels endless.After two and a half hours, “Drama” leaves one exhausted, not exhilarated. It’s made up of many — far too many — ingredients, but drama isn’t one of them. More