(please note: this is Emory's press release)
Emory Dance Company's Connecting Voices
1st draft press release EDC Fall 2002
The Emory Dance Company presents Connecting Voices, a concert of diverse works featuring choreography and direction by Emory faculty and guests.
Faculty members George Staib II and Tara Shepard Myers offer premier selections for the Fall concert. Staib's choreographic intention is guided by mood or feeling, as he strives to create dances that are visually appealing, viscerally evocative, and open for interpretation. In his piece "Courting the Damned" for sixteen dancers, Staib invites the audience to create a story line for themselves as the piece moves from its dark and eerie beginning to frenzied movement. Myers creates a new work that incorporates tap, jazz, step and hip-hop and investigates how these forms merge to produce a total experience. The musical score for this piece has been engineered and mixed here in Atlanta by Brian "Toronto" Baldwin. Anna Leo has restaged "Solitary Dancer," a work she premiered as part of last year's collaborative performance with Emory's Wind Ensemble. This work is inspired by Warren Benson's piece of the same title, and "deals with the quiet, posed energy that one may observe in a dancer in repose, alone with her inner music." Movement material for the piece stems from exercises and phrases constructed for dance technique classes.
Guest artist and Emory dance alum Blake Beckham presents a duet that initially took shape through a collaboration with Camille Dieterle, who now resides in New York. Beckham re-crafts this movement to explore "the human struggle to communicate and connect." Choosing the motif of hands lodged inside of their pockets, Beckham directs the dancers to fight, thrash, spin and spill, and then to ultimately come together in a rich connection expressed through the sharing of weight, and support of each other's bodies. The piece features live performance of a score by Atlanta artists Adam Overton and Ben Davis.
The concert is further highlighted by the restaging of excerpts from an 1831 piece "Ballet of the Nuns" from the opera-ballet Robert le Diable. Choreographed by Romantic ballet artist August Bournonville, this work is important to the history of dance as it is the first time lighting, set design, choreography and costuming functioned together to create the magical and otherworldliness that would be indicative of the many romantic ballets to follow. It signaled new developments in ballet technique and the use of pointe work. The work has been read from a Labanotation score (a system of symbols which records dances) and directed by guest artist Valarie Mockabee. "Ballet of the Nuns" will be performed again in February 2003 as part of the "Opening the Space" concert which celebrates the new Schwartz Performing Arts Center.
Performances of Emory Dance Company's Connecting Voices are at the Performing Arts Studio, 1804 North Decatur Road, Friday and Saturday, November 8th and 9th at 8:00 p.m. General admission is $8.00, and $6.00 for students, artists, seniors and children. Information: 404-727-5050, boxoffice@emory.edu, and www.emory.edu/ARTS.
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