People are saying...:
- "...breathtaking show... with a spirit of enthusiasm, romance and joy... resonated with a sense of ecstasy and challenge." — Rania Khallaf, Al-Ahram Weekly, Cairo, Egypt [full article]
- "Serious and graceful work... displays creativity and talent that are worth seeing... One of the really successful features of Carlitz' work is that the selected music and choreography fit so well together." — Michael Phelan, baydance.com [full article]
- "Watching this dance for the first time, all I could think and feel was... if the opening of this dance were shown to all the young girls in elementary schools, every one would want to be a dancer when she grows up." — Jim Tobin, bayareadancewatch.com [full article]
- "This is a trim, well-drilled modern troupe with fluid lines... [The] sense of ensemble unity is extraordinary..." — Paul Hertelendy, artssf.com [full article]
- "Whimsy and color... often light-hearted..." — Rebecca Wallace, Palo Alto Weekly [full article]
- "...strength of quirky movement..." — Mary Ellen Hunt, Ballet-Dance Magazine
- "Proof that creativity knows no bounds..." — Gary Masters, sjDanceCo
Dance company puts masterpieces into motion
With ‘Gallery,’ Natasha Carlitz Dance Ensemble creates choreography from paintings and sculptures
By Heather Zimmerman, paloaltoonline.com - March 28, 2024
You could say that Natasha Carlitz Dance Ensemble’s latest show is a bit of a museum piece — one that spans centuries and styles of art. “Gallery” is a series of vignettes that bring works of visual art to life through dance. The Palo Alto-based dance company presents the show March 29-30 at Cubberley Theatre.The ensemble’s artistic director and founder, Menlo Park resident Natasha Carlitz, said she was looking to do a more diverse and varied show, following up an all-Mozart piece “In Parting,” that was spurred by the death of a close friend and focused on a singular subject.
“I don’t remember exactly where the idea came from,” she said, “but I thought, ‘art is so different, and if I base works on different paintings and sculptures, they will take me in different directions and they will be associated with different types of music and different types of movement. It’ll be fun for the dancers to get to do a lot of different things after being very classical in the Mozart piece.'”
From a 16th-century Dutch portrait to 1960s op-art, the show touches on many different artistic movements and styles.
Carlitz selected the art that inspired the choreography in a variety of ways. “There are a mix of pieces that I have loved my whole life, which were just really fun to work with, like making a deeper connection with an old friend,” she said.
Chief among those old friends is Matisse’s “The Snail,” which Carlitz said she “fell in love with” when she was just 4 years old. The colorful painted collage enchanted Carlitz as a young child visiting London’s Tate gallery. Her family lived in England for a year and outings to the Tate would spark her imagination, she said.
She used favorite pieces as a jumping off point, but also included works by artists that she had never heard of before.
“I started seeking out new pieces of art — things that were new to me and sparked new ideas or were visually interesting to me. Some maybe four to six (pieces) are artists that I had not heard of before I started working on this project. All my YouTube and suggested links everywhere are now completely art-based, so I’ve just gone down some of those rabbit holes and learned new things,” Carlitz said.
Audiences will get to see the art that inspired the choreography projected behind the dancers during the show. In addition to Carlitz’s choreography, “Gallery” also highlights pieces by two guest choreographers who are dancers in the company.
“There’s a prologue that introduces the artwork, and so I think that although the moods of the pieces are really different, it should feel kind of like entering a gallery and strolling through the rooms where there’s different art but you’re still in the gallery,” Carlitz said.
“And just for fun, for an inside joke, we’re using Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition‘ for the prologue,” she added.
Selecting the music for each piece also led Cartliz down some illuminating paths.
“What I didn’t anticipate was how much fun it has been to choose the right music for each of the pieces because I got into researching the artists and their relationships with composers or their different connections, which are all described in the program notes,” she said.
For example, she noted that a piece inspired by French artist Sonia Delaunay is accompanied by the traditional jazz championed by the Hot Club de France, a music society co-founded by her son, Charles Delaunay.
Company composer-in-residence Mike Coffin contributed music to the show, as well, with two original works, one based on a travel poster and the other taking inspiration from Edward Hopper’s famous painting “Nighthawks.”
“I was not allowed to hear it until it was complete, so I did not influence it at all,” Carlitz said of Coffin’s Hopper composition. “And then I worked with the combination of the painting and the music to try to bring out what I felt were stories in both of them. The piece is called ‘Four Stories.'”
While all of the pieces convey unique stories and emotions, from poignant tales to humorous moments, overall, Carlitz’s aim for the audience’s experience is simple.
“Joy, that’s it. Yes, I just want to make people happy. If they start getting more immersed in art or thinking about the musical connections or something like that, that’s a plus. That’s like extra credit. But really, I want them to feel happy,” she said.
The feminist in dance
Rania Khallaf has been caught up in the message and magic of dance choreographed by women
By Rania Khallaf, Al-Ahram Weekly - July 1, 2010
The Egyptian International Modern Dance Festival is in its second week and is getting more exciting as it gets underway. Three consecutive dance shows, all distinguished in their own way, were choreographed -- and mostly danced -- by women and proved that women from both East and West have managed to cross the gender limit, or let us say the red line, more effectively than ever before.Last week the Natasha Carlitz Dance Ensemble presented a breathtaking show. A choreographer and dancer, Carlitz imbued the stage with a spirit of enthusiasm, romance and joy. The ensemble of eight dancers, all women, resonated with a sense of ecstasy and challenge.
Established in San Francisco in 2005, the Carlitz ensemble specialises in modern dance choreography addressing themes ranging from abstract mathematical concepts and verbal games to physical puzzles posed by unusual spaces. The programme presented at the Gomhouria Theatre last week, however, was a repertory of works choreographed by Carlitz over the last decade, and retained a hint of neo-classicism.
The dances included Tempus Fugit, a celebration of life danced to the beautiful Beethoven Violin concerto in D and a set of three haunting solos set to arias by Carl Orff; and Time Running Out, an altogether gloomier work in which dancers are driven to the edge of endurance in a rebellion against the inevitably predetermined and limited nature of time.
The second half of the programme was rather brighter. The costumes were vibrant and the performers danced with energy and that belied their light steps, especially in the one dance with a sportive theme.
Heba Fayed, an Egyptian artiste who joined the company two years ago, is the only non-American member of the ensemble. The audience applauded warmly at the end of the performance when the beaming Fayed sat on stage along with the other dancers and told the story of her unique experience with the ensemble. Fayed worked with Walid Aouni's contemporary dance company for seven years, and was the lead dancer in such performances as Moving Sands and Scheherazade. She won a scholarship to study modern dance in Europe, and later flew to the United States to join the Natasha Carlitz Dance Ensemble.
No Farewell to Arms at Carlitz Dance
By Paul Hertelendy, artssf.com - 2009
The word hasn't gotten around on the elusive Natasha Carlitz Dance Company. But it will, it will.The opening night at the Cowell Theater Jan. 9 drew too small an audience—a smattering of about 100—but the fully committed performers, if they took note, were no less committed to their mission.
Carlitz created all seven of the dances, most of them recent or new. Her style features nine bare-foot women in bright, form-fitting outfits showing off—no, not legs! It was arms, swaying captivatingly like willow limbs in the wind, unlike any other troupe around.
This is a trim, well-drilled modern troupe with fluid lines, even when dropping to the stage in a springy corkscrew fashion. The NCDC has the usual limitations of single-gender ensembles to be sure. But the sense of ensemble unity is extraordinary as groups come and go to the wings with aplomb, at times leaving difficult numbers like a quintet forming smooth formations on stage. Clearly, this mysterious four-year-old company that provides neither address nor phone number is poised to move up to the next step, whether in transparency, virtuosity, choreographic variety or gender diversity.
The overall theme for the weekend run was "Time Flies (when you're having fun)." But the focal dance "Time. Running. Out" was the least consistent all night, often looking like a high-energy aerobics dance class. (Running in place? Sports bras? Please, give me a break!)
Carlitz created the first science-inspired dance I've seen since Margaret Jenkins' "Strange Attractors" in the 1990s. "Principles of Magnetism" played out dual polarities and attractions, as well as dancers' circular lines suggesting magnetic lines of force around the Earth.
There was daring in "Triptych," three different devotional solos showing off, improbably, the dancers' backs (Jetta Martin, Tiffany Yee, Christina Chelette) more than the front.
The ensembles jelled in "Tempus fugit" (2008), using the last two movements of Beethoven's Violin Concerto. The slow movement was a bit of slow motion, satin-smooth, reminiscent of choreographer Antony Tudor, with dancers casting coy and enigmatic glances out toward the house, and making effortless falls and rises to the stage. Movable platforms not only spotlighted solos, they also revealed dancers in angular positions hidden within, like 19th-century mechanical dolls come to life.
Engaging symmetries pervaded the new duo "Figment." But I couldn't help thinking during the lifts that this was an obvious boy-girl concept that had to be executed by two women, Annie Thatcher-Stephens and Christina Chelette.
Carlitz, who took a final-curtain bow with her San Francisco-based company, explains that the recent "Time" works were done during her father's terminal illness, when the passage of time, and the optimum use of it, became a paramount issue.
Her company is something close to a one-woman band, wherein she takes on all the related tasks short of flying scenery.
All the music, which was both popular and classical, was prerecorded and neatly amplified in the inviting, intimate San Francisco theater.
Review of Natasha Carlitz Dance Ensemble
By Michael Phelan, baydance.com - January 30, 2010
A dance performer since childhood, Natasha Carlitz' credits include performing for several Bay Area choreographers and with High Release Dance. Her choreography has been performed by ODC San Francisco, Dance Visions, sjDanceCo, Dancin' Downtown in San Jose, the Retail Dance Festival, and San Francisco's Dancing in the Park. In a natural progression, in 2005 she founded her own company, the Natasha Carlitz Dance Ensemble. However, despite her experience and accomplishments, Carlitz supports herself not as a full-time dance professional, but in a hi-tech job at Google. You wouldn't know it by watching her choreography.The Ensemble's performance on Saturday the 30th consisted of an ambitious collection of seven works performed by ten barefoot young women. In "Time. Running. Out," six dancers' rapidly pulsating and rigid steps mark the passage of time. Arms sway and reach, as if for a goal. It took me a while to get in touch with this work, I think because the beginning is overlong. After awhile I found it engaging, although it could have benefitted from costuming, rather than dance workout attire.
In "Tightrope," dancer Tiffany Glenn dances on an imaginary tightrope, costumed with a whimiscal skirt and parasol, to the song "Heatwave." It's a brief, but enjoyable fantasy.
"Context" is a thought-provoking piece. Melissa Gordon-Wollin and Annie Thatcher-Stephens sit on chairs, one chair from a 1950's chrome and vinyl dinette set, the other a straight-backed, traditional wooden chair. The dancer on the vinyl chair rises and dances to Suzanne Vega's voyeuristic "Tom's Diner." From the wooden chair, the dancer performs to Andrew Lloyd Webber's piously-toned "Pie Jesu."
"Linear Transformations" was one of the most creative and enjoyable works of the evening. It is dedicated to a mathematician, and may have been inspired by Carlitz' hi-tech career. Divided into four parts, with names such as "Solid Geometry" and "Matrix Theory," the work features ten dancers in jump suits of various bright colors (not unlike the Google logo?). ["Finite Fields"] opens with four dancers spinning out of their wrappings of brightly colored sashes. When unwound, the sashes stretch across the stage, roping it off.
"Catulli Carmina" was serious and stately, with the dancers performing lifts that are usually done by men in both modern and classical dance. A repeating movement was a gesture with the right hand moving first slowly in front and then quickly behind the back. With no apparent meaning or purpose, this gesture gradually became a distracting annoyance. In all fairness, I've seen something like this in one of Mark Morris' works; I didn't like it there either.
"Current" is an easy-going, pleasant work performed by three limber dancers to the song "Reef Surfing."
The evening closed with "Tempus Fugit," with music by Beethoven. In a creative use of props, the work opens with legs and arms protruding into the air from behind black boxes. Later, the boxes are moved about the stage and turned around to reveal dancers inside in various positions. This is a serious and graceful work.
One of the really successful features of Carlitz' work is that the selected music and choreography fit so well together. Another is Karen McWilliams' creative costuming. It is too bad that some of the evening's works did not make use of this creative advantage, instead using ordinary workout clothes and sports bras, which seemed to give the works a feeling of ordinariness. Maybe I'm just missing the point.
Despite some small rough spots, Natasha Carlitz Dance Ensemble displays creativity and talent that are worth seeing. Upcoming performances are listed in the BayDance.com February and March calendars.
S.F. Top 5 Emotional Dance Moments 2011
By Jim Tobin, Bay Area Dance Watch - January 10, 2011
"Sometimes we dance for our Fathers..."This thought occurred to me earlier this year, after a conversation with Natasha Carlitz as we stood in the lobby of ODC Theater, following her company's performance. I had been touched by an opening to one of her dances and she explained to me that it was a dance she choreographed for her father as he lay dying of cancer. I was moved even more by the gift she had created for her father and for herself. So, from time to time, throughout the year, my mind has wandered back to that evening with Ms Carlitz and her work of art. I realize now she started me on a journey that has brought me to this blessay: BADw's Top 5 Emotional Dance Moments for 2011. In honor of Ms Carlitz, her company of dancers, her father, the dancers mentioned below and the local dance scene in general, I dedicate this blessay....
Tempus Fugit by Natasha Carlitz (ODC Theater)
Ms Carlitz's dance begins in a darkened stage with three separate spotlights. Under each light is a lone female dancer lying on her back - with only arms and legs visible dancing in the air. Watching this dance for the first time, all I could think and feel was...if the opening of this dance were shown to all the young girls in elementary schools, every one would want to be a dancer when she grows up.. I shared my reaction with Natasha right after her dance at ODC and she described how she choreographed the dance for her father as he was dying of cancer. To which I asked, Did he see his dance? ...only the first part, Natasha explained. At that moment I realized, dance subjects don't get much better than when we dance for our fathers...
Moods in motion
Dance program mixes grief, courage and whimsy
By Rebecca Wallace, Palo Alto Weekly - January 2, 2009
Three dancers sit with their backs to the audience. They all cast long looks over their shoulders, then gradually turn away.This is the point when Natasha Carlitz always gets choked up. Her choreography is often light-hearted, but this moment in her program "time flies (when you're having fun)" makes her think of her father, longtime Palo Alto resident Michael Carlitz, who recently died of cancer.
"It's like you're looking for someone, but they're not there," she says. "So you slowly look away."
Much of the program, which the Natasha Carlitz Dance Ensemble will perform in San Francisco next weekend, is a tribute to its creator's father. In a way, it's also a salute to her first dance teacher, Grace Butler, and her years growing up dancing in Palo Alto.
Carlitz says Butler, who ran a local YMCA program for many years, helped her become not only a strong dancer but also someone with a penchant for movement of all kinds. Carlitz enjoys improvising and mixing styles; she could be inspired by a mathematical formula or by equipment swinging on a construction site. She's less into heavy layers of meaning and more into playfulness and musicality.
Take, for example, her 2006 work "Off Your Rocker," part of the "time flies" program. Carlitz puts four dancers in colorful unitards and sets them in motion atop IKEA toys — curved pieces of plywood that serve as minimalist rocking horses. Meanwhile, two pieces of music overlap: a bright British composition by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, and a moodier piece by Japanese musician Shin Terai.
"It's hard for the dancers because they are two different tempos," Carlitz says during an interview, her hands describing the rocking motion. "I wanted something wacky, maybe circus-y."
With its whimsy and color, "Off Your Rocker" is Carlitz's piece that was most directly influenced by Grace Butler, she says. Her dance vision has also been shaped by other teachers and dancers over the years, including Judith Komoroske, with whom Carlitz studied in Menlo Park after graduating from Amherst College in 1992. She also did workshops with Jonathan Wolken, one of the founders of inventive dance troupe Pilobolus; and worked for several years with the Bay Area collaborative group High Release Dance.
With High Release Dance, Carlitz was able to work on all aspects of producing a show, such as marketing, organizing rehearsal schedules and securing performance spaces. She found the experience invaluable, and three years ago decided to strike out on her own.
The Natasha Carlitz Dance Ensemble is based at The Ballet Studio in San Francisco, where most of the group's dancers live. Carlitz lives in Menlo Park, balancing running a dance troupe with life as a web designer at Google.
In "time flies," Carlitz won't perform, which is unusual for her. But she wanted to focus on choreographing and directing, taking a big-picture view of the show.
The program is a mixture of moods and music, with many works dealing with the theme of time and how we use it. Two pieces, "Time. Running. Out" and "Tempus Fugit," are the most about Carlitz's father.
In May 2007, Michael Carlitz was diagnosed with liver cancer and given six months to live. Instead, he lived until September 2008, and his daughter said he made remarkable use of the time. She often felt like a "time bomb" was hanging over the family. But she also saw how her father appreciated every day: his friends, his relatives, the weather.
Carlitz set "Time. Running. Out" to pulsing techno sounds from the German film "Run Lola Run," music that her father particularly liked. She calls her choreography here "edgier," filled with the anger and desperation she felt. She stands up to demonstrate some of the piece's sharp moves: a hand hitting a leg, her neck held at an angle.
In contrast, "Tempus Fugit" is set to two movements from Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D Major. The slower part, a relatively minimalist work, is about "remembrance, looking back," and contains the moment that always makes Carlitz choke up. She just finished crafting this section a few weeks ago.
Then there's the faster part, which she dubs "Movement in Present Tense." It's a joyful section filled with jumps, saluting her father's courage. That upbeat mood closes the show.
Carlitz points out that the Beethoven piece has a third movement. "To be complete, I guess I would have a movement about the future." She smiles wistfully. "But I'm not there yet."
Dance preview: Need for movement
By John Orr, Palo Alto Daily News / San Jose Mercury - January 27, 2010
Her need to create movement, says choreographer Natasha Carlitz, is "almost like a compulsion. If I am not choreographing, I get very grumpy to be around."A multi-talented person who holds a degree in English from Amherst but who pays the bills by working as a user-interface designer for Google, Carlitz runs the Natasha Carlitz Dance Ensemble, which performs Friday and Saturday at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco.
Choreography, says Carlitz, who was raised in Palo Alto and who now lives in Menlo Park, "is the most important part of my life. It makes me feel I have a reason for being."
"It's basically selfish. I love to create movement. And dance is a performing art. It's not complete until it is shown to somebody."
Hence the performances Friday and Saturday, of her 10-dancer troupe. On the program will be premieres of "Catulli Carmina," "a dramatic rendering of anguished Latin love poetry" set to music by Carl Orff, and "Current," a "charging, flowing trio" with guitar music commissioned from Bert Lams and Tom Griesgraber. Also on the program are repeats of other Carlitz dances, including "Time. Running. Out" and "Tempus Fugit," seen in 2009, and "Linear Transformations," a piece Carlitz choreographed 10 years ago in honor of her grandfather, mathematician Leonard Carlitz, who'd been a professor at Duke.
Carlitz was born in London, England, when her father, Michael Carlitz, was working there for IBM. The family moved to Palo Alto when she was a few months old, and stayed. Mother Barbara and her father divorced when Carlitz was 13, but lived only three blocks away from each other. After college at Amherst, Carlitz has lived in Menlo Park.
Carlitz started dancing when she was 5, under the tutelage of Grace Butler at the Palo Alto YMCA.
"Probably 30 years of children in Palo Alto danced with Grace," Carlitz says. "I credit Grace with getting me started with dance classes that would keep me going. If I had started with a different teacher, I might not have remained so enchanted with it."
She was a member of High Release Dance in Palo Alto for seven years, but left that troupe because she wanted to do more choreography.
"It's a collective, they take turns. Once every two years was not enough for me. I wanted to go whole hog with choreography, so I made the break and started my own company."
She still ushers for High Release shows, though, she says.
Carlitz, 38, has stopped dancing in her company's shows.
"I love to dance, but have a stronger performance overall if I am watching and correcting. So I haven't danced in the last few shows we've done."
"What I find most appealing about modern dance," Carlitz says, "is that it is a form entirely created by the choreographer and the dancers, as opposed to ballet or jazz, which have fixed vocabularies."
In those forms people might push the boundaries "... but in modern dance you create every movement. This liberty does not exist in other dance forms. Modern dance is the most expressive dance medium."
It all adds up in math-based program by Carlitz Ensemble
Full show due in San Francisco in October 2014
By Virginia Bock, regardingarts.com - June 22, 2014
Natasha Carlitz Dance Ensemble recently gave us a preview of its new show, "Momentum." If you're intrigued by the idea of an evening dedicated to math- and science-themed dance, be sure to save the date for the fully-staged production, at Cowell Theater in San Francisco on October 17 and 18.Why math?
"I think math actually translates to dance really well," says company founder Natasha Carlitz. "Math is an intrinsic part of music, and music and dance are, for me anyway, tightly intertwined. But dance has access to so many more ways to play with math—tempo and structure, yes, but also spatial arrangements, shapes, and colors."
Carlitz founded her Ensemble in 2005 and is the principal choreographer, although she sometimes stages pieces by company members and others. This program contains new pieces as well as older repertoire, with dancers Rebekah Brown, Maggie Hurd, and Erica Pinigis contributing new works to the program.
"I think that the inclusion of other choreographers' work is a wonderful way to leaven the program with some different movement styles and perspectives," says Carlitz.
A prolific choreographer, Carlitz says she receives inspiration constantly from a variety of stimuli. "I think that because choreography is my primary means of artistic expression, anything that grabs my attention and excites me eventually gets me thinking: ‘How can I use or portray this in dance?’" she says. "Two of the newest pieces in this program were inspired by YouTube videos my engineer boyfriend showed me, one of pendulums swinging in and out of sync, and one of a fractal zoom. Both made me think, ‘I want to reproduce that with bodies in motion!’
"One piece began as an elegy for my grandfather, who was a number theorist, and whose work suddenly seemed to me like the perfect basis for the most ambitious piece I'd ever undertaken at that time—‘Linear Transformations,’ which was completed in 2000."
Since this show—at Dance Mission Theater in San Francisco on June 13 and 14—was a preview, several of the pieces were excerpted, or still in progress. I especially look forward to seeing Carlitz's "Linear Transformations" in its entirety, as well as the completed version of "Scaled to Fit Page," an inventive and mesmerizing piece by Carlitz dancer Maggie Hurd.
Between pieces, Carlitz (through narrator Paul Colley) provides a commentary explaining the mathematical principles that gave rise to the movement or structure of an upcoming piece. While the dances could certainly stand alone, hearing the theory before viewing the piece provides a welcome context, and a reminder that things we take for granted—waves on a beach, or branches on a tree—can be expressed in the language of mathematics. And, as it happens, dance.
Review: Dance Mission Theater Presents HARVEST Choreographers Showcase
By Jen Norris, jen-norris-dance-rev.com - October 9, 2023
The comingling of traditional ethnic dance forms with contemporary themes and styles is a Bay Area tradition. Perhaps the most impactful on this evening, 30 hours after Hamas’s attack and Israel’s subsequent declaration of war, is Shtetl performed by the Natasha Carlitz Dance Ensemble (NCDE). Performing to Jewish music of longing and celebration by Apollo’s Fire, nine dancers in puffy-sleeved white blouses and vests over wide-legged multicolored pants adopt extended arm postures. Elements of the Horah, the traditional cross-stepping circle-dance, infuse the proceedings. The festive nature of the second song finds them cartwheeling and performing deep squatting front kicks.For Shtetl, choreographer Carlitz was inspired by Marc Chagall’s stained-glass window, “The Tribe of Issachar,” and mural “Introduction to the Jewish Theater.” A quick check of NCDE’s website shows that each of her dances has a piece of artwork as its center. In 2023 alone she has crafted work in response to paintings by Edward Hopper, Piet Mondrian and Georgia O'Keeffe. Showcases are great places to discover new talent and I am grateful to have had this introduction to this well-established South Bay based choreographer.