Syndee Winters, the multi-talented singer, dancer and actress, has had a passion for the arts since she was an adolescent dreamer growing up in Miami. The youngest of three children, the Palmetto High grad moved here from New York at age 13 to live with her father and grandmother. Now she returns to Miami as Nala in the Broadway tour of the Tony award-winning smash hit The Lion King, which opens tomorrow night and runs through June 10 at the Arsht Center.

We spoke to Syndee about growing up in Miami, The Lion King, her solo career, and her unbridled excitement for being featured in Miami New Times. She likes us, she really likes us!
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When the Peter London Global Dance Theater presents its spring showcase this weekend in Little Haiti, it won't be just a group of Miami dancers showing off their moves. It'll be a reflection of the influence of styles from around the world, says founder Peter London.

"Miami is very similar to Trinidad," he explains. "There are people from everywhere. It's like the gateway to the world. That's why I called my company Peter London Global Dance Theater, because Miami represents the globe."

The upcoming showcase combines African, Native American, Caribbean, and European traditions, with London's own unique voice sounding behind it. We spoke with the teacher, choreographer, and dancer about the company, where it came from, and what's coming next.
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​Lately, we have been reminded that dance is a fragile art form, as fleeting as life itself. Merce Cunningham's company disbanded at the end of 2011, a year and half after his death. And Pina, Wim Wenders' Oscar-nominated documentary about famed German choreographer Pina Bausch, is a memorial to the recent passing of a powerful force in contemporary performance. The alchemy of dance is so delicate that even the change of one key performer can make a distinct impact.

That's why the international creative community is so eagerly watching the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater as it enters its third generation.

In 2011, Robert Battle was chosen as the company's new artistic director. This assignment of a lifetime is all the more impressive when seen in the context of Battle's background. At an early age, he was placed in the custody of his great aunt, who he refers to as his mother, and the family moved from Jacksonville to Miami's Liberty City neighborhood.
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​Local choreographer and performer Heather Maloney likes to disassemble the ways that we think, see, feel, and move through space. Lately, she and her collaborators Joanne Barrett and Shaneeka Harrell have been conducting experiments in memory. They are deep in the process of building In This Place, a new physical theater project premiering this week.

For this project, Maloney will be stepping outside of Inkub8, her Wynwood dance lab, to explore FUNDarte's On.Stage.Black.Box theater at the Miami-Dade County Auditorium. She recently took a break from rehearsals to tell us what she's been up to.
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Brian Finke

​Decadancetheatre, an all-female crew based in Brooklyn, is all about staying true to hip-hop culture. They use old-school styles -- breaking, popping, locking, and house -- to tell stories on stage.

In their 2004 performance, Decadance vs. the Firebird, the company remade Stravinsky's classic ballet. For their Miami debut at the Adrienne Arsht Center, they will perform When the Sky Breaks 3D, a live performance set in dimensional video.

Regardless of their experimental attitude, these dancers never forget their ties to the underground. As artistic director Jennifer Weber was warming up in the Miami sunshine, we got a chance to ask her about her company's philosophy.
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​The Step Up movies all have essentially the same plot: Boy meets girl. They dance. They fall in love. They live, and dance, happily ever after.

But there's something a little different about Step Up 4: It all takes place in Miami.

From the looks of the trailer, released this week, the film was actually shot in Miami, including along Ocean Drive, at a Brickell-looking rooftop pool, and on shipping containers at the Port of Miami. The cheeseball story hasn't changed, but it does warm our hearts to see our city looking like a paradise on the big screen. (The sexy dancers don't hurt, either.)

Check out the trailer after the jump.
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Paula Court

​Working separately, from New York and Paris, Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey are trying to undo themselves. For Tool Is Loot, their upcoming performance presented by Tigertail Productions at the Colony Theatre, they subjected their aesthetic assumptions to the opinions and desires of total strangers. Starting with separate "empty solos" -- neutral foundation pieces -- they built, deconstructed, and reshaped a series of collaborations, eventually merging them into a duet. We spoke with Cardona recently about the process.
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Antoine Tempe

​Originally born in Zimbabwe, New York-based choreographer Nora Chipaumire is unafraid to confront the foundations of her own identity. Her upcoming performance, presented by Miami Light Project and Miami-Dade College's MDC Live! performing arts series, promises three bold perspectives on the inward and outward landscapes she has traveled. She will move from a highly charged memoir of Zimbabwe's Chimurenga Chechipiri into a filmed restaging of Anna Pavlova's The Dying Swan, one of the 20th century's iconic ballet solos. A third solo, excerpted from her new work Miriam, takes cues from the life and legend of African singer and civil rights activist Miriam Makeba.

We recently had the opportunity to dig deeper into Chipaumire's creative process, speaking to her about her life and work.
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​Oh, to lead the life of Tamalyn Dallal. In 1990, she founded Mid-Eastern Dance Exchange, the first belly dance studio in Miami Beach. Over the next 15 years, she trained many of the most successful dancers on the global belly dance scene (yes, there is one), including Amar Gamal, Bozenka, Hanan, Samay, and Virginia.

"I felt like the Forrest Gump of bellydancing," says Dallal modestly. In other words, she won't take credit for developing all that talent. She just happened to be in the right place, at the right time.

Well, she's not staying in one place anymore. Like any belly dance star, she travels the global circuit to give workshops in places like Morocco, Spain, and Argentina. She also has a regular gig teaching for two months every year in China, bankrolled by the Chinese government.
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Nora Chipaumire

​One year after You Got Served brought dance floor battles to the silver screen in 2004, Nora Chipaumire was awarded a New York Dance and Performance Award for bringing a much deeper conflict to life through her dance. Her work, titled Chimurenga, will be presented at the Light Box at Goldman Warehouse on January 20 and 21 as a co-production of Miami Dade College's MDC Live! Performing Arts Series. The piece is a performance memoir that depicts the artist's personal experiences growing up during Zimbabwe's second War of Liberation. Through movement, music, and theater, she conveys the confrontations and charged atmosphere of Southern Africa during her childhood.

Chipaumire is a self-exiled artist who emigrated to the U.S. in 1989 and has studied dance formally and informally in Zimbabwe, Cuba, Jamaica, and California, where she received an M.A. and M.F.A. in choreography and performance from Mills College in Oakland. Her show at the Light Box will include three separate pieces: Chimurenga, Dark Swan, and Miriam.
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