The four-part fall series, "Broadway Dances Ballet, Jazz and Tap: Where Has It Been? And Where Is It Going?," will offer this topic on Sept. 25: "A Collaborative How To: Write For Dance; Find Points of Entry in the Script; Realize the Dancing and Make it Work."
The Monday panelists are collaborators Lynn Ahrens, Graciela Daniele and Stephen Flaherty, who worked together on Ragtime, Once On This Island, Dessa Rose and more.
The lecture series coordinators and panel moderators are Liza Gennaro and Sally Sommer.
The discussion will be 4-5:30 PM at The Great Hall, Marymount Manhattan College, 221 East 71st Street in Manhattan, between Second and Third Avenues.
Admission is free and open to the public. For additional information call (212) 517-0610. The other fall 2006 Marymount panels will be:
Director-choreographer Graciela Daniele has choreographed and directed on Broadway and around the country and has earned 10 Tony nominations. Her Broadway credits include Annie Get Your Gun, Ragtime, The Goodbye Girl, Once on This Island, Zorba, The Rink and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. She is an associate director of Lincoln Center Theater where she choreographed and directed Elegies, A New Brain, Marie Christine, Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Hello Again. Daniele also directed and choreographed the musical Little Fish at Second Stage and choreographed the NYSF production of The Pirates of Penzance in New York, Los Angeles and London.
Songwriters Lynn Ahrens (lyricist) and Stephen Flaherty (composer) are winners of Broadway's Tony Award for Ragtime. They received two Academy Award nominations and two Golden Globe nominations for the songs and score of the animated feature film, "Anastasia." They are co-creators of Once on This Island and Seussical. Their new work, The Glorious Ones, will be directed and choreographed by Daniele at Pittsburgh Public Theater in 2006-07.
On Broadway, Liza Gennaro choreographed the revival of Once Upon a Mattress starring Sarah Jessica Parker, and the critically acclaimed Broadway revival of The Most Happy Fella, directed by Gerald Gutierrez. At The Paper Mill Playhouse, she choreographed Gypsy starring Betty Buckley, and a newly revised version of the Lynn Ahrens/Stephen Flaherty musical Ragtime. She has worked at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Hartford Stage, The Guthrie Theatre and elsewhere. In the 2006-07 season Gennaro choreographed Loving Repeating: A Musical of Gertrude Stein, composed by Stephen Flaherty and constructed by Frank Galati and presented by About Face Theater in Chicago. She also choreographed the 30th anniversary national tour of Annie, currently playing and heading to Madison Square Garden in December. Her father created the original musical staging in 1977. She holds a Master's degree in dance studies from NYU and is professor at Barnard College, Marymount Manhattan College, and Hofstra University. She is currently conducting oral history interviews with influential musical theatre dancers and choreographers for the Oral History Division of The New York Public Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.
Sally Sommer, dance historian, dance critic, and academic, is widely recognized as a leading expert on dance in American popular culture. As associate professor of the practice of dance at Duke University, she taught courses in history of modern dance, history of African-American dance, and dance criticism. Since the autumn of 2001, she has been a full professor at Florida State University, teaching in the master's program in dance. As a dance critic and performance journalist, she writes regularly for periodicals in this country and for Le Monde, the Paris-based journal for which she is special New York correspondent. As a historian, Sommer served as dance editor for the Encyclopedia of African-American History and Culture (Macmillan, 1996), and she has served as commentator and artistic consultant on dance performance for national public radio and public television, focusing on social dance, tap dance, dance in music videos, and contemporary club dance.
