Students Works and Course projects – Monday & Tuesday, May 6 & 7

Monday, May 6 at 2 PM
Advanced Choreography projects by juniors, Aubrey Donisch and Genevieve Legowski.
Enter Goodhart through the glass lobby and turn left for the stage entrance
[Aubrey; Genevieve]

Monday, May 6 at 7 pm and
Tuesday May 7 at 6:30 pm 
(NOTE time difference)
Enter Goodhart through the glass lobby
and turn left for the stage entrance                                [Tali; Sophia]

Tali Laurence will present two works for her
Senior Thesis Choreographic Project, “50” and “A Ram’s Melody”.
Dancers include Tali Laurence, Isabel Clark, Sarah Curtis, Morgan Hartlein Allen, Calumina McCondochie and Heather Robinson. Tali’s brother, Eyal Laurence, composed the music for “A Ram’s Melody” and will provide
another piece in the short interlude between her dances.
Sophia Silver, a senior dancer, will also present a group work, “tangled threads: webs we weave” as part of the program. Dancers are Kirsten Bernhardt, Isabel Clark, Shivani Parikh, Sophia Silver, and Jasmine Stanton

Tuesday, May 7 at 3 pm
Students in the introductory Dance Composition Course will
present their final projects.

Bryn Mawr and Haverford student dancers will take to the stage for the Bryn Mawr College Dance Department’s annual Spring Dance Concert. This year, nearly forty students will perform in the works of distinguished choreographers: Linda Caruso Haviland, Melanie Cotton, Lela Aisha Jones, Lauren Putty White, and Meredith Rainey. Students will also perform Tensile Involvement by renowned twentieth century choreographer, Alwin Nikolais. This seminal 1953 work investigates kinetic metaphors for human experience and was restaged by Alberto del Saz, longtime member of the Alwin Nikolais Dance Company and artistic director of the Nikolais/Louis Foundation for Dance

(above) BMC and HC students rehearsing Ballet Ensemble by Meredith Rainey

Friday and Saturday, April 26 and 27 at 7:30 p.m.
McPherson Auditorium, Goodhart Hall
FREE admission and open to the public
Reception follows in the Benham Lobby           
GPS address: 150 North Merion Ave,  
Bryn Mawr, PA 19010
For information:  (610) 526-5210

BMC and HC students rehearsing TENSILE INVOLVEMENT

This performance and dialogue, led by Lela Aisha Jones, Postdoctoral Fellow in Dance, activates embodiment as a location for processing a violent social climate as well as states of oppression and privilege. The evening will also cultivate embodied activism and ceremonial diasporic revival. We will honor those who traverse daily racism and its intersections with our time, attention, and humility. Grounded in movement traditions and cultures of Black and African diasporic descent, there will be a mix of textual, performance, and participatory elements as a part of this event.
Conceived, directed and performed by Lela Aisha Jones and Flyground dancers, Amanda L. Edwards, Peaches Jones, Oiya Lowe. Student intern, Jasmine Stanton, will be substituting for Aigner Picou.

Friday, March 29th, 7:30 PM promptly
Goodhart Mainstage (enter through glass lobby in the rear of the building)
Free but you must register(https://brynmawr.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_beXul9K3S777ltj)
This is the last event in the College’s 2019 Community Days of Learning

Bryn Mawr College    Goodhart Music Room
Tuesday        March 5, 2019      7:30 PM         Free admission

The Backyard is a performance piece that was developed in a residency with iconic dance artists, Steve Paxton and Lisa Nelson, in summer 2017 and 2018. Performed by Megan Bridge and Beau Hancock, this 45 minute improvised dance proposes a hyper-conscious inhabiting of time, space, and relationship; a radical invitation for intimacy and embodiment. Placing Paxton/Nelson’s work PA RT (1978-2002) at the center of their research, The Backyard exists in a landscape of deep listening and rigorous attention. With music by Robert Ashley, this new work is also a palimpsest of PA RT—an effaced manuscript, written over, but still bearing traces of its original form.

<fidget> has toured The Backyard to Plovdiv, Bulgaria and Lublin, Poland, and has performed in Philadelphia at Temple University, as part of the Philly Fringe Festival, and at The Performance Garage.

A discussion with the artists (and light snacks) follow the performance.

This performance of The Backyard at Bryn Mawr College was funded by
a Mellon grant to support “Promoting the value of the Humanities”

Fun Kosev Biz Cleveland

Created and performed by Dylan Seders Hoffman.
In collaboration with Tali Laurence, Genevieve Legowski, and Sonja O’Brien.

A Torah School dropout turned Yiddishist, a Conservadox Jew, a cultural Jew, and one Quaker.
What does the next generation of Judaism and Jewishness look like? What possibilities open when we define Jewish continuity for ourselves? And what exists in the space between longing and belonging? In this performance, mixing together dance, Yiddish song, Hebrew prayer, flowing water, and hot oil, we show you what we’ve found.

Come join us:
Saturday, Feb. 23 @ 7:30pm
Sunday, Feb. 24 @ 2:00pm
McPherson Auditorium Stage, Goodhart Hall, enter through glass atrium on the side
Free & Open to the Public, reception follows each performance”

Saturday, February 16 at 7:30 
Hepburn Teaching Theater/Goodhart Hall
Bryn Mawr College (GPS location 150 N. Merion Ave, Bryn Mawr, PA)
FREE admission

Faculty choreographers will present their solo choreography and their group work featuring Philadelphia dancers and musicians.

Corinne Karon, will bring Tap Team Two with her, a spirited company of tap dancers who will perform to the music of Vivaldi. They will also perform a work honoring the great, late Philly hoofer LaVaughn Robinson.
Rebecca Malcolm-Naib presents Aria, a duet to the music of Armand Amar.
Dana Powers-Klooster, new to the region, will offer Unlaced, a solo on fear and self-doubt.
Lauren Putty White, veteran of the celebrated Philadanco company, will do a new solo and a duet with trombonist Brent White.

above: Lauren Putty White and Brent White
left: Tap Team Two (Corinne Karon, Robert Burden, Rochelle Marie Haynes)

Wintry Mix | Performance Festival

Fri-Sat | Jan 25-26 | 8 PM | Hepburn Teaching Theater, Goodhart Hall  FREE to tri-co community but reserve tickets
(Wintry Mix includes material for mature audiences)

A sampler of what’s new in Philly performance, Wintry Mix offers A sampler of what’s new in Philly performance, Wintry Mix offers two different sets of performances curated by featured artists Nichole Canuso and Cynthia Hopkins. It’s a cabaret of new experimental and adventurous works, free snacks/drinks, and a post-performance dance party each evening. Each set includes several acts or performances, no one more than 15 minutes in length

Themes:
Friday/Nichole Canuso – a cabaret of catharsis  opportunity to that both mourns and celebrates the inevitability of change

Featured Artists: Adrienne Truscott, Eliza Hardy Jones, Jennifer Kidwell With: Eun Jung Choi, Jess Conda, Meg Foley, Martha Graham Cracker, Helen Hale, Rhonda Moore, Chelsea Murphy, Guillermo Ortega, Pax Ressler, Emily Schuman Dance Party DJ: Pax Ressler

Saturday/Cynthia Hopkins – Philadelphia artists who are boldly experimenting with social justice and audience engagement
Featured Artists: Meg Foley, Annie Wilson, Martha Graham Cracker, Applied Mechanics’ The Bandits Dance Party: In The Dance soul line dancing (Selena & David Earley)

This Spring, three terrific choreographers are making works on our students along with one guest artist from NYC who will reconstruct Alwin Nikolais’ classic work, Tensile Involvement.

    
Meredith Rainey, who last choreographed for us in Spring 2017 (image), will return to set a work on the Ballet Ensemble. He founded and directed Carbon Dance Company from 2009 to 2014, and was co-director of PITCH, a creative cross-discipline incubator for work. Meredith danced with the Milwaukee Ballet, was a soloist with the Pennsylvania Ballet and is a prolific choreographer with numerous grant awards and company commissions to his name.  The Audition is Wednesday, January 23rd at 4:10 in Pem.

This Spring the Modern Ensemble will perform a reconstruction from the repertory of the renowned mid-20th century choreographer, Alwin Nikolais–Tensile Involvement.  This work was created in 1953 and is an early example of Nikolais’ interest in multi-media dance theater and kinetic metaphors for human experience. Tensile Involvement will be set on student dancers by Alberto del Saz, longtime member of the Alwin Nikolais Dance Company and artistic director of the Nikolais/Louis Foundation for Dance.  The work will be taught in two intensive weekend rehearsal periods: Feb. 1-3 and Feb. 8-10, followed by once a week rehearsals with Mady overseeing. We need 10 dancers to make this work so I hope all interested intermediate and advanced dancers will come to the audition on SUNDAY, January 27 at 2:30 in Pem.

Lela Aisha Jones, a BMC Consortium for Faculty Diversity Fellow, will demonstrate another side of her talents when she makes a work for our African Ensemble this Spring. As a choreographer beyond BMC’s walls, she has been selected as a Leeway foundation Transformation awardee, an incubated artist at Headlong, and a fellow with the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, among other choreographic honors. The audition is Thursday, January 24 at 7:10 in Pem.

   
And last but not least, we are delighted to announce the return of Melanie Cotton as choreographer for the HipHop ensemble. Melanie worked with our students in 2014 (image) and 2016.  She danced with Philadelphia’s all female hip hop dance company Montazh and then went on to become a core member of the internationally renowned company, Rennie Harris/ Puremovement, which developed a new genre, Hip-hop/Street Dance Theater.  Other performances include work with Pig Iron and the Fringe and the Walnut Street Theatre’s production of In the Heights. Melanie has choreographed and offered her unique movement style to various theater and dance companies like 1812 Productions, Philadelphia Theater Company, Arden Theater Company and Temple University’s Theater Department. The audition is Tuesday, Jan 22 at 7:10 pm, Pem.

1) On Saturday December 15 at 1PM in Pem, student dancers in the Modern Ensemble, choreographed by Professor Caruso Haviland, and the Jazz Ensemble, choreographed by guest artist, Lauren Putty White, will show the dances they’ve been working on this past semester.  These Ensembles will meet a few times in the Spring to ready the pieces for the  Spring Dance Concert on April 26 and 27.

(Modern Ensemble dancers Louisa Perrin, Dylan Hoffman, Hanna Higgins, Heather Robinson, Jasmine Stanton, Sonya O’Brien, missing-Angela Zhang.  Jazz Dancers include Rebecca Namyet, Lizzy Culp, Hanna Higgins, and Lourdes Taylor)

Four other Ensembles will hold auditions and rehearse in the Spring for the concert: African Ensemble under the Direction of Dr. Lela Aisha Jones; Hip-hop working with guest choreographer Melanie Cotton; Ballet Ensemble which will be choreographed by guest artist Meredith Rainey; and a special reconstruction project of Alwin Nikkolais’ Tensile Involvement under the direction of Alberto del Saz, a former soloist with the Nikolais/Louis Company and the reconstruciton director of the Nikolais/Louis Repertory.

2) On Tuesday December 18 at 2:30 PM in PEM, the introductory composition course Dance Composition: Process and Presence will show final solo and group projects under the direction of our Dance Composition faculty member, David Brick.  All are invited.  Bi-Co dancers include Sarah Curtis, Sarah Depew, Ameesha Dugal, Hanna Higgins, Leah Jarvik, Tali Laurence, Andrew Nguyen, Sophia Silver, Jasmine Stanton, Lourdes Taylor, Kejing Wang, Lea Williams, Sayori Yoshida.

Hanna Higgins from the Comp Class

Abby Z leading a challenging (and exhausting) but fun master class exploring how to safely investigate and try some elements, including speed and dynamics, along her more extreme movement range.