IYKYK (if you know you know): Fall Senior Projects

VCUarts Department of Dance and Choreography will present IYKYK  (if you know you know), the 2019 Fall Senior Project Concert, on Saturday, November 16th at 7:30PM at The Anderson (907 ½ W Franklin St.) and Saturday, November 22nd and 23rd at the Grace Street Theater (934 West Grace Street) Richmond, VA. Tickets are $15/$10 students with valid I.D. and free to VCU students with valid I.D. Tickets are available now at Showclix.com or by calling 804-828-2020.

The performance on November 16 will feature a site-based work by senior Jenna Beardsley at The Anderson (no admission required), located at 907 ½ W Franklin St. The work will be performed three times between 7:30-8:30 pm, with 10 minute intermissions between the showings, followed by a one-hour dance party. The stage works, performed at the Grace Street Theater, will begin at 7:30 pm on November 22nd and 23rd.

IYKYK is a professionally-produced capstone experience that serves as the culmination of senior dance majors’ time creating and researching in the VCUarts Dance + Choreography Department. This show acts as a celebration of the individual artists’ voices, and serves as the official commencement of their future careers and influences as members of the global dance community.

Through the lens of a Palestinian directly affected by the Israeli occupation, Olivia Alsamadi highlights the experience of being displaced in and from one’s homeland. A movement language derived from traditional Arab dance forms illuminates the resilience and community of Palestinian women facing the hardships of existing in a land that has been stolen and destroyed. In this work, Alsamadi uses the various textures of human connection to map new and old pathways within an occupied space.

You are invited! Come out and experience a queer utopian future that will be created and destroyed around you in The Anderson, transformed into an underground dance world. Serving you an immersive dance theatrical event, Jenna Beardsley has worked in collaboration with the performers to reveal their ephemera through playful movement vignettes where they will engage, dance, feel, build, and get lost, reorienting themselves as well as their audience. Come out and together we will contradict ourselves, conceive new worlds, and live fantasies.

In a process-oriented excavation of performance, Taylor Bonadies facilitates an opportunity and landscape for self-discovery through performative agency. Time slows and expands as the audience is drawn to participate in the energetic evolution of the performers; they each construct and articulate their distinct embodiment of performance. Their innermost intricacies are woven into the work through structure, texture, and embodiment as dancers draw the audience into their channel to taste the electricity themselves. 

In what do we trust? Does faith mean we blind ourselves to conflicting truths? Do we linger in the dimness of ignorance, simply because it is the only light that others have shown us? These are the questions Elizabeth Drake is posing in Nodus Tollens. Set in Plato’s allegorical Cave, a community of nine dancers experiences a disruption in their group dynamic as one of them goes on a journey of spiritual self-discovery that leads to a clash between  individual and groupthink.

We make connections every day but how many of them sit with us? How many moments do we let ourselves pause and authentically connect with the people around us? Kasey Grigsby, in Unraveling Connections, investigates authentic connections through willingness and vulnerability. By sifting through the layers of life, she asks performers to cultivate a space and energy in which strength in softness draws out these moments. 

Through empirical analysis, potentiality is not attained, but through investigation it will be explored. Within this 10 minute segment, certain humans will encounter a level, where their abilities will be pushed. Chaunci Hannibal’s work takes the form of the Human Experiment of Potentiality:
Scenario 1) Potential — Advantage + Privilege+ Fear=?
Scenario 2) Potential + Advantage+ Privilege — Fear =?
Scenario 3) Potential — Advantage — Privilege — Fear=?

(Advantage=Money)

Questions:

  1. Does privilege without advantage bring a sense of complacency that blocks ones’ advancement?
  2. Does privilege and advantage without fear give the rest of humans a sense of insecurity that inhibits them from reaching their abilities?
  3. Does disadvantage in life motivate or hinder the potentiality of a human being?

In Julia Turgeon’s A Tender Reflection, a multigenerational cast of dancers investigates the energetic connection between women and their maternal ancestors, pulling on the tether that connects them to their pasts and their futures. The dancers discover the circular nature of history as they fall through a time and space of simultaneity, their movement supported by the echoes of the women who have come before them.

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IYKYK is the fifth event in the VCUarts Dance + Choreography 2019-2020 performance season. Recognized by professional dancers and choreographers as “a place where things are happening,” Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of Dance and Choreography offers a vibrant and stimulating atmosphere where students prepare for careers in dance.