Abby Z and the New Utility will be performing abandoned playground Friday and Saturday, December 7 & 8 in the Hepburn Teaching Theater, 8 PM.  Free admission for Tri-Co students, faculty, staff.
Nine dancers rip through a work of great energy, intensity, surprise, and danger, performing complex sequences of hyper-physical dance. Choreographer Abby Zbikowski draws together influences of hip-hop, tap, and West African dance with a punk aesthetic to create her own movement lexicon. As the dancers push the boundaries of their endurance, they forge an intense ensemble connection through vocalizations and the channeling of communal energy.
AND
MASTER CLASS with Abby Z…. for any intermediate level dancers and up…
warm up, try some movement sequences in her style, improvise a bit….
THURSDAY December 6, 4:10-5:00 PM  in PEM STUDIO

Abby Zbikowski is a choreographer, Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and faculty member at the American Dance Festival. Her choreographic work with her company, Abby Z and the New Utility, has been presented by the Gibney Dance Center, Movement Research at Danspace Project, and most recently the Abrons Arts Center where the company had a sold out run of its latest evening-length piece, abandoned playground. Zbikowski has been an Artist-in-Residence as part of the nEW Festival in Philadelphia, the American Dance Festival, and the Bates Dance Festival. She has studied intensively at Germaine Acogny’s L’École de Sables in Senegal, holds a B.F.A. in dance from Temple University, and an M.F.A. in dance from Ohio State University, where she worked closely with mentors Bebe Miller and Vickie Blaine. As a performer, Zbikowski has worked with Charles O. Anderson/Dance Theater X, Vincent Mantsoe, and the Baker & Tarpaga Dance Project. She has been on faculty at the Ohio State University and has taught technique and creative process abroad at the Academy of Culture in Riga, Latvia as part of Global Practice Sharing, sponsored by Movement Research. In 2017, she received the Juried Bessie Award which recognizes a choreographer who exhibits some of the most interesting and exciting ideas in dance in New York City today.

The Museum of Dance with Boris Charmatz in Philadelphia; learning the intricacies of Khmer Classical Dance; alumna returns to Philadelphia for performances. . . 

Dylan in rust colored shirt, Bethan in black pants/leotard. Lisa in blue shirt outside.

Dylan Hoffman and Bethan Lodge rehearsed for a full weekend and then performed the next in 1973, under the direction of internationally renowned French choreographer, Boris Charmatz. A structured and directed improvisational work,1973 was performed in the beautiful foyer of the Barnes Museum located in the museum area of the Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia. Over 100 students from area Dance Programs and Departments danced in two performances that were part of the day long Charmatz project entitled Museum of Dance that distributed dance events by professional dance/performance artists and companies throughout the Museum and its grounds.  Also participating was Lisa Kraus, our recently retired coordinator for the Performing Arts Series and a former dancer with Trisha Brown.  She gave a lively lecture-demonstration on the aesthetics and movement of both Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton.

[Agnès Peysson-Zeiss (French Department), Hanna, Chamroeun Yin, and Sayori

Sayori Yoshida and Hannah Higgins both participated recently in a workshop in Khmer (Cambodian) Classical Dance taught by Chamroeun Yin. Yin came to the United States as a Cambodian refugee from the infamous border camps during the period of the Pol Pot genocide, part of the Khmer Classical Dance Troupe, which toured the nation in the 80’s.  In addition to his dancing and teaching he creates many of his own costumes and masks.  The event was co-sponsored by Dance, East Asian Languages, and the Cities Programs.  After class, Sayori and Hannah tried on parts of the traditional women’s costume, the Sbai.

On October 19th and 20th, Amancay Candal Tribe Kugler, HC ’15, returned to Philadelphia as part of a quintet that constitutes the contemporary circus company, Yes Ma’am Circus. Amancay graduated cum laude with a B.A. in Psychology from Haverford and Dance from Bryn Mawr . She started learning aerial arts in college, studied in Philadelphia and completed training at the Aloft Circus Arts Full Time Training Program in Chicago.  She went on to train in circus instruction at Aloft and studied as well at New England Center
for Circus Arts.         

It’s Not Me, It’s You:
A Paradise Lost Reimagining,
an imaginative, visually beautiful,
and technically impressive  re-rendering of Milton’s
Paradise Lost,
Amancay performed the role of the angel,
Uriel (left in first image).

For more on the making of  this production click here 

END OF SEMESTER DANCE SHOWINGS….

Technique and Composition and Choreography courses invite you to studio showings of work.
ALL showings in PEM STUDIO
Juice and Cookies will be served!

The technique classes will be showing pieces of choreography or segments from set works or fragments of dancing worked through during the semester. These are very short…so show up at the stated time or you’ll miss them!

TAP CLASS MONDAY APRIL 30 at 4:30

BEGINNING BALLET  WEDNESDAY MAY 2 AT 11:40 AM (short excerpt from ‘peasant dance’  Swan Lake Act I)

ADVANCED MODERN   THURSDAY  MAY 3 AT 5:15 PM

The DANCE COMPOSITION Class will show solo and group final projects (about an hour)
TUESDAY  MAY 8  at 3:00 PM

Advanced Choreography Studio Showing
Dylan Hoffman’s 
Everything I Know About the Torah I Learned from Dirty Dancing (1987) and My Mother’s Bat Mitzvah
Tuesday, May 8, 8PM   (running time @ 15 minutes)

Bryn Mawr and Haverford student dancers take to the stage for Bryn Mawr College Dance Department’s annual Spring Dance Concert. The concert is the highlight of the Dance Department’s spring calendar and presents an eclectic range of dance styles, featuring works choreographed or restaged by faculty, guest choreographers, and advanced students. This year, nearly thirty students will perform in the works of our distinguished guest choreographers: Felicia Cruz, Joe Gonzalez, Peaches Jones, Everett Perry-Johnson, Katherine Kiefer Stark, and Olive Prince (check out bios and images here ).  The performances take place Friday and Saturday, April 27 and 28 at 7:30 p.m. in McPherson Auditorium, Goodhart Hall, Bryn Mawr College. Seating begins at 7:00 p.m., the concerts are free and open to the public, and a reception follows in the Benham Lobby. For general concert information, please call (610) 526-5210.

Join the Dance Program on Saturday, April 7 to see the Pennsylvania Ballet in a program called “Grace & Grandeur.” It offers three works from different ballet eras: Paquita, choreographed in 1881 for the Imperial Ballet of St. Petersburg by Marius Petipa, the “father of classical ballet”; Theme and Variations from 1947 by renowned neo-classical choreographer George Balanchine; and For Four by contemporary ballet choreographer Christopher Wheeldon. Come see how ballet has changed over time and how it has remained the same. The performance is at 8 pm at the Merriam Theater in Center City Philadelphia.

                                                    Des mots insensés
                                            [That You Will Understand]

 Tabitha Senior Dance Thesis Performance

Tabitha Performance Group was founded in 1999 by Bryn Mawr dancer Emily Harney and visual artist Amanda Eicher for the purpose of presenting advanced student choreographic works in concert. It is funded through SGA with additional support from the Dance Program. The direction of the performance project is traditionally handed down to rising seniors who have demonstrated both ability and commitment to dance making within the Dance Program .

Here is Tabitha… a group named after and inspired by misidentification.” –Jessica Honig ’01

THIS WEEK...February 1st through 3rd,  Bryn Mawr will be hosting Ralph Lemon,  among the more interesting dancer/choreographers in the past 2 decades.  He is a dancer, a choreographer, but is also a visual artist and curator and has been described as “a polymath and shape-shifter,” who “builds politically resonant and deeply personal projects” in collaboration with artists around the world.

Events are FREE for Tri-co community

MASTER CLASS… Thusday from 4:10-5:30.  He said that it’s not a technique class but more about creative process…asking ourselves questions about dance and dancing and making dances and then thinking and applying that to body, movement, space.  It’s a great opportunity to hang out with a really interesting artist and think about or try out some movement ideas.  He is very low key and interested in talking with and working with students.

CEREMONIES OUT OF THE AIR  (a lecture/performance), on Friday, February 2, at 8 p.m. in Hepburn Teaching Theater, Goodhart Hall. In Ceremonies Out of the Air, he merges live performance, storytelling, and film to invoke his long-standing exploration of the American South.

THE GEOGRAPHY TRILOGY SCREENING  with Ralph Lemon and special guests  on Saturday, February 3, from 1 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. in Hepburn Teaching Theater, Goodhart Hall.

Lemon’s The Geography Trilogy is a profound, and worldwide, 10-year inquiry into the social gravities of art, race, and identity at the turn of the 21st century. In addition to their performance, each work generated a book and a film.  All three of his films documenting the Geography Trilogy will be shown with commentary and readings by Lemon and close collaborators Katherine Profeta  (dramaturg) or David Thomson (performer) in-between. (Note, David did his first two plus years at as a student at Haverford College)  Drop in for one or stay for all.

1 p.m. Geography (1997)
3:30 p.m. Tree (2000)
5:45 p.m. Come home Charley Patton (2004)

Geography: a collaborative work about being American, African, brown, black, blue black, male, and artist. Lemon traveled to Africa in search of dancers and a new relationship to the stage. At every juncture the collaboration posed difficult questions about representing African dance and culture within the context of modern America’s post-slave heritage and his efforts to negotiate different dance traditions without either erasing or cementing them.

Tree: the second installment in Ralph Lemon’s critically acclaimed performance trilogy documents his travels through India, Indonesia, China and Japan as he retraces the Buddha migration map. “More artistic sociologist than mere traveler, Lemon kept journals, drew, collected ephemera, conducted informal interviews, and took photos as he explored performance traditions and met the performers with whom he would eventually choreograph an evening-length work. . .In the process, he worked through his own preconceptions and misconceptions about the people and the places he encountered.”

Come Home Charley Patton: Lemon’s final work in the trilogy returns him to the US where he journeys the mythic roads of migration in the Deep South searching out “narratives that do justice to traumatic memories like those of lynchings and the struggles of the civil rights movement; working with historical sources on the blues; and reinventing the theater as a space “filled with ancestors telling their stories.