A exultant weekend — yes, even before the Mavs’ victory. And oh yeah, even before the Tony Awards, can’t forget them.

Friday and Saturday night, the Bruce Wood Dance Project debuted before several hundred excited dance lovers. It may prove to be one of the more important events for contemporary choreography in North Texas, marking a possible Start of Something Good.  Coming back after five years — and moving his work east to Dallas from Fort Worth — Wood delighted the near-capacity crowds in the Arts Magnet’s Montgomery Arts Theatre with his new troupe of young dancers (and the impressive veteran from the Dallas Black Dance Theatre, Nycole Ray).

So far, BWDP is only a “one-step-at-a-time” project and not a full-bore dance company. But Wood showed what he was capable of — from his  utterly charming comedy medley-debut, Happy Feet, to Ray’s powerful going-mad-in-the-kitchen solo, The Edge of My Life So Far, and Wood’s established crowd-pleaser, his sexual-warfare-on-a-train-to-hell treatment of Ravel’s Bolero.

Then, the next day, former Dallas Morning News scribe Manny Mendoza announced the launch of his DFW Dance Blog.  (We should note that Manny has written for this here website on occasion.) He was inspired, Manny says, by his three weeks at last summer’s NEA Arts Journalism Institute for Dance Criticism, held during the American Dance Festival in Durham, NC.

Which, it just so happens, is where he is right now.

Manny hopes to provide a necessary resource:

While my coverage will not be comprehensive, I plan to map the Dallas-Fort Worth dance scene, focusing on professional, semi-professional and college companies that are creating and performing high-level work; chronicle national and international troupes making tour stops in the Metroplex; and provide links to interesting and informative dance writing elsewhere.