Dance contest. Tomorrow night at the Century Ballroom.

The ostensible mission: to blow the minds of the judges (Pat Graney the choreographer, Joyce Taylor the TV person, and me) with a reproduction of/riff off Beyoncé's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)."

The actual mission: To raise money for Velocity Dance Center (which won the first Stranger Genius Award for organization back in 1812).

Grand prize: $300.

Mistress of Ceremonies: Indigo Blue.

Time: 9 pm to 1 am.

Go. You won't regret it. More here.

You have seen it many times. Charles Mudede has fixated on it. Rotund men in leotards have danced to it. David Schmader has written a brief exegesis of it:

Fact #1: We will spend the rest of our lives looking at Beyoncé, a self-made superstar of the first (or at least second) order. Fact #2: The video for "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)"—black-and-white, dance-packed, meticulously delivered—may stand forever as the woman's greatest work. From the flowing back and forth between Broadway dazzle and sex-drenched street moves to the gloriously odd off-key buzzing that swells under what would otherwise be a mercilessly repetitive chorus, the song-and-video combo makes for an endlessly watchable classic. Underlying everything—the shocking bursts of athleticism, the gold-star precision of the execution—is the fact that Beyoncé is a glamorous zillionaire who never needs to lift a leg again if she doesn't want to. But as a self-made superstar of the first (or at least second) order, she lives to please and dazzle and thrill us.

On Saturday, September 19, you and your co-dancers and -dependents will have a chance to win $300 for your best interpretation of the "Single Ladies" video.

The event is a benefit for Velocity Dance Center (one of the first winners of the Stranger Genius Award) and the renovations for its new home on Capitol Hill. It will happen at the Century Ballroom.

I am one of the judges.

My esteemed colleagues (choreographic genius Pat Graney, KING 5 TV anchor Joyce Taylor, and hostess Miss Indigo Blue) might be looking for athletic precision, energy, fidelity to the choreography.

Me? I want to be surprised. Show me something I'm not expecting, something that will make the audience spontaneously howl with delight, and I'll fight my hardest to make sure you get the bucks and the glory. (And I reserve the right to change my criterion at any time.)

For more information, see here.

You've got 11 days and counting. Waxie Moon, in the poster, is already winning.

The original video, for reference and inspiration, is below the jump.

Jessie Smith is a tough young bird.

Between her theater company Implied Violence and her dance company Dead Bird Movement, the very small twentysomething dancer has been flung, dropped, spit at, slapped, and held underwater—sometimes by her own hands.

Smith's dances, which she typically performs solo, have the muscle and pacing of heavy metal: savage thrashing interspersed with grindingly slow balances and precarious postures. Her Double Feature, playing above a pottery warehouse next to the train tracks in Sodo, begins with a dance film shot in Berlin. To an eerie score by Jherek Bischoff, Smith wanders around in an orange tutu, making little leaps on a crowded train platform, through some industrial rubble (barefoot), in the dark on a spray-painted sofa. She presses her butt against a warehouse wall and leans forward, curving her spine, caving her chest, and twisting her arms gracefully inward.

This is Smith's signature posture. She turns her small and willowy body into a scaly bird claw, or a curved, leafless branch in winter. It's a kind of self-effacement, a young limber body making itself gnarled and cold. The camera jiggles as she lifts one leg and, for just an instant, we can see scabs and blood on the tops of her feet.

The second half of Double Feature, in the flesh, is even tougher. In a small, spare room with 12 fluorescent poles, Smith and drummer Jeffrey Mitchell perform a fearsome duet. He pounds the toms and cymbals, filling the room with a wash of percussive noise, panting loudly in the occasional breaks. Smith rocks and jumps, twisting her bird-claw arms and pivoting violently on the balls of her feet. The drums go silent, and she slowly folds herself into a runner's starting posture, walks around the floor on her knees, and flings herself up and around. The drums begin again.

Panting, Smith hauls a table with an unopened bottle of Maker's Mark and five shot glasses into the center of the stage. She lines up the glasses and pours five shots, drinking the first two quickly. The third goes down with more effort and coughing. She stares at the other two slack-jawed and panting, like an exhausted boxer. Smith holds her hand over her mouth to keep the fourth shot in. The fifth she swallows, then immediately vomits back up through her fingers. She looks pissed. The audience winces and leans forward at the same time.

The rest of the dance is slower, Smith executing difficult balance postures, struggling against her own drunkenness. She lifts one leg slowly, painfully in the air, her lips curled in a determined snarl, her eyes rolling back in her head. It's an ode to effort, to self-limitation, to being one's own worst enemy. She thrashes some more, then collapses. The drummer stops, walks onto the stage, and drags Smith out of the room. The audience claps and murmurs.

A young, crusty punk dude says to no one in particular: "That was hardcore."

Dead Bird Double Feature plays tomorrow night. Details here.

... is dead.

Cunningham was one of the lions of modern dance. He turned his back on the Graham/Balanchine legacy, and—along with Jerome Robbins and Paul Taylor—helped mold dance into a major contemporary art form.

Cunningham was born in Centralia and attended Cornish College of the Arts, where he met and fell in love with John Cage.

After seeing him dance, Martha Graham invited Cunningham to New York. He eventually rejected Graham's style (too fusty), quit her company, and formed his own—a major moment in dance history. Along with Cage, Cunningham collaborated with Warhol, Nauman, Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, and many others.

He died at 90 and hadn't danced in a long time. But those who saw him haven't forgotten. From the NYT:

He had also been a nonpareil dancer. The British ballet teacher Richard Glasstone maintains that the three greatest dancers he ever saw were Fred Astaire, Margot Fonteyn and Mr. Cunningham. He was American modern dance’s equivalent of Nijinsky: the long neck, the animal intensity, the amazing leap. In old age, when he could no longer jump and when his feet were gnarled with arthritis, he remained a rivetingly dramatic performer, capable of many moods.

... until 1989, when he reached the age of 70, he appeared in every single performance given by his company, Merce Cunningham Dance Company; in 1999, at 80, though frail and holding onto a barre, he danced a duet with Mikhail Baryshnikov at the New York State Theater. And in 2009, even after observing his 90th birthday with the world premiere of the 90-minute “Nearly Ninety,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music he went on choreographing for his dancers, telling people as they went to say farewell to him that he was still creating dances in his head.

He kept choreographing until the end. And may have been the only 80-year-old in history to perform a duet with Baryshnikov.

RIP, Merce. (And, as the first commenter noted, to Pina Bausch who died a few weeks ago.)

Photo from merce.org.

Construct, by Tanja Liedtke at On the Boards, is marvelous: an oblique meditation on a love triangle and the way building a home with a person is a means to domesticating her (in this case, it's a her).

The themes are small-scale tragedy, but the dance is both comical and thrilling to watch. It begins with a man and his two women, playing mannequins—he's trying to keep them upright, setting one and running to prop up the other while the first falls. It's a vaudeville routine, using women as inanimate objects, that had the audience laughing at the visual jokes and gasping at the muscles required for a human being to really, actually, be as rigid as a doll.

It got better from there.

From the (very short) preview for Construct:

Last August, young choreographer Tanja Liedtke had a case of insomnia. She got up for a 2:00 a.m. walk around her neighborhood in Sydney, Australia, and was struck by a garbage truck. She died alone. Construct, her final work, is a North American premiere and may be your only chance to see Liedtke's choreography. A vigorous piece for three dancers with a score by DJ TR!P, Construct is a critically celebrated—and apparently funny—piece about a love triangle and the relationship between making a performance and making a home.

And here's a very short video of Liedtke dancing (the solo) in 2003's Cost of Living with DV8:

Get tickets if you can. Unlike many OtB shows, Construct is not having a Sunday performance. Apologies for my moronism.

Yesterday, Slog mentioned how Zoe Scofield had been tepidly received by the New York Times.

Today, the Boston Globe pays them and their touring show—the devil you know is better than the devil you don't—enthusiastic compliments.

Given its Boston premiere over the weekend by the Seattle-based husband and wife team and their company, it is unapologetically confounding, yet insidiously memorable, like a crazy dream you just can't shake. At the center of it all, there's a furious little heart that pumps equal parts vitriol and grace.

As the other dancers enter the fray, Scofield's thorough grounding in ballet shows, not just in steps - elegant leaps and arabesques, pointed articulate feet - but in the formal clarity of ensemble movement in vivid, coherent patterns. But Scofield also draws from modern dance, Butoh, even yoga, juxtaposing luxurious stretches and graceful spins with flat-footed walks and a repeated march-like rocking in deep plie. The corps leaps like gazelles then skitters on all fours like monkeys. A playful trio dissolves, leaving one dancer manically twitching. Energy shifts on a dime.

Read the whole thing here (and The Stranger's profile of Scofield and the devil here).

The dying swan solo from Swan Lake"Le Cygne" from Camille Saint-Saëns's Carnival of the Animals, courtesy of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo—the drag homage/satire of fusty, old-time Russian ballet.

Read the Guardian's profile of the company—they started as a two-weekend whim in 1974—here.