Silencing the Tides, is a work by Olive Prince that exists under and around a large sculpture fabricated from clothing by visual artist Carrie Powell. Tides is influenced by works as wide ranging as O’Brien’s The Things they Carried and writings by the 8^th century Venerable Bede and is based on the idea of free will, juxtaposed with messages and metaphors from nature, evoking strong images of the ocean’s tide, the feeling of sand and the changing nature of the waves. 

Sept 16 at 5pm + 7pm       
Sept 17 at 2pm + 4pm
$18
Ballroom Philadelphia
1207 Gerritt Street

Lela Aisha Jones | FlyGround will premiere Everyday Saturday and also feature Jesus & Egun, proclaimed by Eva Yaa Asantawaa as a choreographic world she would want to live in permanently. These works are from Jones’ newest series, Plight Release and the Diasporic Body

September 22 & 23  7:30 PM
$20
Conwell Dance Theater at Temple University
1801 North Broad Street, 5th Floor

TICKET INFORMATION at  http://fringearts.com/all-presentations/

TECHNIQUE CLASSES AND ENSEMBLE REHEARSALS START THE WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 11
(September 5 for Composition and academic lecture seminar courses)

BALLET PLACEMENT CLASS  Any new, incoming students interested in INTERMEDIATE OR ADVANCED BALLET
Students who are interested in taking intermediate or advanced ballet must attend a placement class on THURSDAY, AUGUST 31,  5:15 – 6:30 pm in the Pem Dance Studio.  Come dressed to dance (ballet slippers only); no need to prepare anything.

ENSEMBLE AUDITIONS  Generally for students working at intermediate or advanced levels: first year students are welcome.  Auditions are run as a class, no need to prepare anything.

Modern Ensemble with Olive Prince           Wednesday, September 6          4:10 pm    Pem Studio
Ballet Ensemble  with Felicia Cruz               Thursday, September 7              7:10 pm    Pem Studio

These ensembles plus four more offered in the Spring (Jazz, Modern, African, Hip-hop) and, often, one or two advanced choreography pieces, are shown in the yearly main stage Spring Dance Concert, this year on April 27 and 28. Students need to commit to semester rehearsals and to performance week rehearsals in the Spring.

Dance Outreach invites student dancers who have experience in performance in any technique to come to the information and movement session.
Dance Outreach  with Mady Cantor         Friday, September 8         4:40 pm    Pem Studio

Dance Outreach Project is an ensemble that visits schools in the Philadelphia area with lecture/demonstration programs featuring original choreography and music.
[Outreach Info/Movement session – contact mcantor@brynmawr.edu for more information]

Extracurricular dance groups that would like to utilize Pem or Denbigh Dance studios for rehearsals should send a group representative to an informational meeting with Mady Cantor on Saturday, September 5 at 11:00 AM in the GOODHART COMMON ROOM…   (mcantor@brynmawr.edu)

Bryn Mawr and Haveford student dancers will take to the stage for the Bryn Mawr College Dance Program’s annual Spring Dance Concert. . .

This year, nearly thirty students will perform in the works of critically noted guest choreographers including: Kyle ‘Just Sole’ Clark, former dancer and rehearsal director with Rennie Harris Puremovement, co-founder of Funky Sole Fundamentals, and co-Director of Just Sole-Street Dance Theater; Rev. Nia Eubanks-Dixon, former dancer with two high-powered companies, Urban Bush Women and the Chuck Davis African American Dance Ensemble, ordained minister and educator, and choreographer with Danse4Nia, acgilmoredance, and others; Megan Mazarick, a Philadelphia-based independent choreographer, performer and teacher who has toured her work in the US and in places as far flung as Egypt, Singapore and Poland; Shannon Murphy, co-director of IdiosynCrazy Productions, a sought-after independent dance artist who has worked with a wide range of choreographers and a choreographer in her own right who has presented work in the US and Canada; Meredith Rainey, former soloist with the Pennsylvania Ballet and Ballet X who has won numerous awards and grants for his work that has been performed in both North and South American as well as European venues, presently co-director of Pitch-dance; and Madeline Cantor, Associate Director of the Bryn Mawr College Dance Program, former dancer with one of Philadelphia’s pioneering Modern companies, Dance Conduit, Director of Dance(Teaching Artists Group) and a board member of Dance and the Child International. Senior dance major, Joy Angelica Chan will present an excerpt from her work “InVisible”

The concert runs under an hour and a half including intermission and seating begins 30 minutes prior to performance. The concerts are free and open to the public, and a reception follows in the Benham Lobby.

Tell your friends!

On March 30, Director of Dance, Dr. Linda Caruso Haviland, was honored by the Performance Garage in Philadelphia–along with  Sharon Friedler, recently retired as Director of the Swarthmore College Dance Program, and Bayard Storey, distinguished emeritus professor of the UPenn School of Medicine and patron of the arts– for service to the Philadelphia Dance community.  Jeanne Ruddy, is Executive Director, Resident Artist, and Co-founder of the Performance Garage. Colleage, Bill Bissell, Director of Performance at Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, presented Caruso Haviland, and dance colleagues Meredith Rainey and Tania Isaac provided a  section from their co-choreographed work (IN)VISIBLE as her performance component. Dancers are Brian Cordova and Donavan Reed. All photos are by Joe Lobolito.

Sunday, April 9 at 3:00 PM

Jessica Lang Dance is a contemporary dance company based in New York dedicated to “the beauty of movement and music.” A dance critic in the LA Times wrote that Jessica Lang “has the knack for conceiving a complete universe in each dance — distinctive in its look, mood, sound and atmosphere.”  The Philadelphia program will offer these various universes in an array of highly musical and physically exciting dances, including Thousand Yard Stare, a riveting tribute to veterans set to a Beethoven string quartet. The title refers to the blank and bewildered gaze of the shell-shocked soldier returning from war. The Los Angeles Times notes the “ballet is spare yet evocative and gorgeous throughout.”

The performance is a matinee at 3:00; the bus will leave Pem Arch at 2:00. Tickets are $15 at a group rate; transportation is free.

If interested in this opportunity respond to this email asap, and then get a check (payable to BMC) or cash to my office in Goodhart 104B by April 3, but the sooner, the better.

Join us for a talk and discussion with Lela Aisha Jones
Monday, March 20th
7:10 to 8:15pm     Goodhart Music Room

Lela is an ABD candidate in Dance at Texas Women’s University and is a candidate here for the Consortium on Faculty Diversity fellowship. She is also an active artist and an artist activist who intertwines personal history, diasporic movement, social commentary, and interdisciplinary methods, drawing from, in her words, “the individual and collective lived experiences of blackness.” In the Fall, Lela took her work to the streets as an initiator and the lead organizer for marches and social actions through Dancing for Justice Philadelphia in solidarity with the movement concerning Black lives. More recently, Lela spent several weeks in South Africa teaching and performing with the Same Story Different Countries Project directed by Dr. Lynnette Overby at the University of Delaware and in New Zealand where she worked with artist & scholar Ojeya Cruz Banks exploring embodiment ideas around race, land, and diaspora.

Lela is the founder of FlyGround, her creative home where, in solo and in collaboration, she cultivates her diasporic movement practice and artistry.  Her recent work includes Native Portals: Release Mourning Clearing (2016). Jones says this work “unravels and reinterprets black diasporic experiences of activism, witnessing, testifying, and restoration to investigate processing continual cycles of trauma.  She will be co-presenting Lynching and Love, March 16th at the Painted Bride, which will show a documentary film by Megan Bridge chronicling her correspondence with Lela, interweaving that with Bridge’s responses to Jones and company’s performance of the work. This will be followed by two nights of performances of The body Wails/The Body Restores by Lela and Vershawn Sanders Ward, a work that weaves contemporary reflections on the race, womanhood, trauma, history, and their various intersections. There will be a pre-show reception with the artists at 5pm on the 18th and pre-show talks by Dr. Brenda Dixon-Gottschild on both evenings. Lela is a 2016 PEW fellow 2015 Leeway Foundation Transformation awardee, an artist in residence at the Community Education Center in Philadelphia, an incubated artist at Headlong Dance Theater, and a recipient of a 2013 Dance/USA Philadelphia Rocky Award. She received her MFA in dance from Florida State University. In addition to the awards and honors listed above, Lela is also a member of the inaugural 2015 Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellows designed by leaders at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute in NYC.

Tuesday and Thursday,
March 21 and 23
4:10-5:30  PEM STUDIO

Magnetic Spaces: Dancing in Partnership

A Workshop with guest artists Marion Ramirez and Jungwoong Kim

Grounded in their practice of Contact Improvisation and other dance and arts forms, Marion and Jungwoong will guide our students in exploring giving into and challenging gravity, looking at ways of resonating with the rhythm and melody of the other dancers and their kinesphere, and playing with how to be in synch while indulging in opposition or riding a common wave. Coming in and out of physical contact, in and out of shared weight, these practices have the potential to inspire clarity of communication, generated in the elasticity in the space between the bodies. Open to students in any dance technique at the intermediate level and up.

Marion Ramirez is a Puerto Rican dance artist, dedicated to the art of improvisation and inspired by collaborative process. From a young age she was immersed in the Puerto Rican artistic community in San Juan, studying and performing forms such as pantomime, flamenco, ballet, theater, Latin American social dances, modern and postmodern dance with inspiring experimental choreographers. She graduated from the Laban Center in London, UK with a BFA in choreography, and more recently she was a University Fellow at Temple University where she completed an MFA in Dance with a focus in Community Arts.  She has performed with choreographers Yvonne Maier, Sally Silvers, Noemi Segarra, Merian Soto, Petra Bravo, Myrna Renaud, Lizzy Le Quesne, Jean Abreu among others. With her partner, Jungwoong Kim, she has collaborated in numerous site specific performance projects including Kim’s recent project, SaltSoul, Ramirez’s most recent work Musa Paradisiaca was performed at Conwell Theater in Philadelphia and Pregones Theater in New York and her community arts project Caperucita Roja and The Big Bad Wolf was performed at the

Willie Torres Boxing Gym in North Philadelphia.  Ramirez has taught at Drexel University, Temple Univeristy, and Universidad Sagrado Corazon in Puerto Rico among other institutions.

Jungwoong Kim was born and raised in South Korea and had extensive training in martial arts and Korean traditional dance and ritual, both of which strongly inform his artistic vision and aesthetic. After graduating from Korea National University of the Arts in Seoul with a BFA in choreography, he performed and toured throughout Korea and Asia with the award-winning dance/theater group Trust Dance Company, and with other ensembles. Jungwoong’s choreographic and collaborative works were presented at the National Theater of Korea and supported by the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture.  Kim studied contact Improvisation and choreography in New York on an Arts Council of Korea award   and later studied with composer Pauline Oliveros.  He is presently an artist-in-residence at Asian Arts Initiative and a Pew Center for Arts & Heritage multi-year grant awardee for his project, SaltSoul. He has taught for University of the Arts, the University of Richmond, Korea National University of the Arts, and Chonbuk National University among other institutions