ST. LOUIS, MO — On National Tap Dance Day, tappers opened and closed the final evening of Spring to Dance, capping three full days of performances at the Touhill Performing Arts Center. The night began with MoSTLy TAP, a local company started in 2017, and ended with Chicago Human Rhythm Project (CHRP), which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. And the…

ST. LOUIS, MO — It’s not a new trend. Contemporary dance has shared a kinship with minimalistic music for decades. As an undergraduate dance major around the turn of the century, I too was smitten by composers like Arvo Part and Philip Glass — I mean, there’s something intriguing about musical maps which are beholden to process. They’re scores which…

ST. LOUIS, MO — With nightly performances through Saturday at the Touhill Performing Arts Center, the annual Spring to Dance festival is slowly building to a boil, spending much of its first day of programming firmly locked into contemporary dance. You had to make it to the end to see anything else, with the second of two programs — 6…

ST. LOUIS, MO — It’s become easier than ever to learn about ourselves, with mail-in genome readers like 23andMe and Ancestry.com giving you more information than you might ever need to know about your health, family and cultural background based on a swab of saliva. But what does one do with such powerful information? Knowing about your genome can inform (and…

ST. LOUIS, MO — I came to this year’s Spring to Dance festival figuring the best-case scenario would be to experience nothing out of the ordinary. Dance St. Louis, the local presenting organization which has produced Spring to Dance for 11 years, had already cut the Spring to Dance line-up from three days to two, drastically trimming its programs and personnel…