Dance Companies

Dawn Cooper Barnes, Howard Community College professor and artistic director of the Aurora Dance Company -- considered one of Howard County's premier dance companies -- is in a bit of a hurry.She is constantly on the go, moving to her own beat. Finding a few minutes to talk to Barnes, 40, is sometimes tricky unless she can schedule it between her many daily appointments, meetings and rehearsals.In addition to her solo dancing career, there are her responsibilities as Aurora's choreographer and her tight schedule at HCC, where she teaches courses on film, dance, English and mass media.

Dawn Cooper Barnes, Howard Community College professor and artistic director of the Aurora Dance Company -- considered one of Howard County's premier dance companies -- is in a bit of a hurry.She is constantly on the go, and finding a few minutes to talk to Barnes, 40, is sometimes tricky unless she can schedule it between her many daily appointments, meetings and rehearsals.In addition to her solo dancing career, there are her responsibilities as Aurora's choreographer and her schedule at HCC, where she teaches courses on film, dance, English and mass media.

Members of Surge Dance Company began offering instruction last spring at Harbor Arts Center in Federal Hill and will expand its program this season.Classes for children and adults at all levels of experience are now being offered in swing, ballroom, jazz, ballet and modern dance, as well as theater and singing, Tuesdays and Thursdays through May 15. The teachers are Ruth Skrzesz, a singer and actress, and dancer Stephanie Thibeault.Harbor Arts Center is in Olive Branch United Methodist Church, Fort Avenue and South Charles Street.

Outside a nondescript building in the Oakland Ridge Industrial Center in Columbia, the minivans are clustered like a herd of manatees at feeding time.Almost the entire enrollment of the Ballet Royale Academy is here for rehearsal: tiny children dressed as ladybugs in red tutus with black polka dots and serious teen-agers in pointe shoes, their hair smoothed back into chignons. Because few of the dancers are old enough to drive, their parents are here, too.Ballet Royale's spring production, which will have two performances Saturday, is "Alice in Wonderland."

Rudy West,65, one of the original members of the Five Keys, which recorded such 1950s hits as "The Glory of Love," "Close Your Eyes" and "Out of Sight, Out of Mind," died of a heart attack Thursday in Chesapeake, Va.William Louther,56, a leading American modern dancer who also directed the Batsheva Dance Company of Israel and helped to establish modern dance in England, died of esophageal cancer May 7 in London. He performed on Broadway and in many American modern dance companies in the late 1950s and '60s, most notably with Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey and Donald McKayle.

Thursday's Howard County edition of The Sun incorrectly reported a concert date. Columbia Pro Cantare will perform the U.S. premiere of the "Celebration Mass" by Czech jazz composer Karel Ruzicka on May 2.The Sun regrets the error.Two members of Aurora Dance Company are warming up on the stage of Howard Community College's Smith Theater and talking about "South Park.""I haven't watched that show," says one."I get my mom to tape it for me," says the other. "I'm never home to see it. I'm always here!"

Batsheva Dance Company is named for its patron, the Baroness Bathsheba de Rothschild. Now Israel's leading dance company, it kicks off the Kennedy Center's five-week "Art of the State: Israel at 50" festival of music, dance, theater, film and -- to end with a bang -- fireworks and a son-et-lumiere show.Batsheva's contribution will be a full-length dance-theater work called "Anaphase" by its artistic director, Ohad Naharin. The title refers to a part of the process of cell division; the movement considers the group as the cell, the dancers as its energies and components.

Because of an editing error, a quotation was misattributed in yesterday's Today section article on Trinity, an Irish step-dancing troupe. The quote -- "I just want people to know that Trinity is not a knee-jerk reaction to 'River-dance' " -- should have been attributed to Mark Howard.The Sun regrets the errors."We don't really care, and we're past all this," says Mark Howard, by way of introduction, though it becomes clear that they do really care and they're not past all this.Howard, artistic director of Trinity Irish Dance Company in Chicago, is the creator of what he calls "progressive Irish dancing": a mixture of Irish step-dance, American tap and modern dance, finished with stories, costumes and stage lighting.

A story in the Arts section on June 22 implied that the Surge dance company, now at the Carver Center for Arts and Technology in Towson, replaced a company called Kinetics. However, while Kinetics has suspended operations as a performance troupe, it still offers dance classes at the Howard County Arts Center in Ellicott City.The article also characterized the Ballet Theater of Annapolis as the only professional ballet company in Maryland. The National Ballet, based in Bowie, pays its soloists a stipend and can be regarded as professional.

The Joffrey Ballet (now of Chicago) has always been a ballet company willing to embrace the works of modern choreographers. It was the first to catapult Twyla Tharp and Laura Dean into the ballet stratosphere.The company continues its tradition in recent performances at the Kennedy Center with the East Coast premiere of Mahmet Sander's "Inner Space" and two excerpts by Dean wonderfully balanced with two dances by the company's artistic director, Gerald Arpino.It is rare for an opening number to be performed with exuberance and skill, but "Suite Saint-Saens," choreographed by Arpino, was so brilliantly danced that several audience members jumped to their feet.