VCUarts Dance + Choreography presents VCUarts Dance NOW 2022, Friday + Saturday, February 11 + 12 at 7:30 pm at the Grace Street Theater. Tickets are free and masks are required. Click here to reserve tickets. Visit us on Instagram for rehearsal and behind the scenes footage!
This annual performance, now back on the concert stage, features new work by Dance majors Sophia Berger, Ashanti Brantley, Elise Cumberbatch, Misha Joao, Nina Loree, Holly Trenbath, and Nelson Mejia; faculty Eric Rivera, Scott Putman, Dr. Kate Sicchio; and guest artist Charles O. Anderson.
Anderson was in residence at VCU in mid December, working with a group of students to set The Long March, a companion piece to his latest work (Re)current Unrest. Inspired by social protest, it is a meditation on what is known as The Long Civil Rights Movement from 1619 to the present.
Additional work by VCUarts Dance faculty features creative explorations in collaboration with student performers, costumers, designers, and even robots.
Exploring the intersection of quantum mechanics and the five spirits of traditional Chinese medicine, in A Cloud of Probability Scott Putman explores the physicality of causality, identity and what it means to reveal oneself through proximity. This journey full of ecstatic dancing and relentless movement, exquisitely performed by six powerful dancers, is a reclaiming of one’s pivotal moments that define the very essence of our being.
Of his new work Esencia, Eric Rivera says, “Dance…simply put is the strength of a muscle, the grace of a pose, the corporal memory of a sequence of moves, and the infinite joy of being true to oneself.”
In collaboration with VCU Engineering faculty Dr. Patrick Martin and The Hive Lab, Dr. Kate Sicchio’s Amelia and the Machine presents the starting point for creative human-robot team research. By creating choreographic performances with dancers and robots we aim to explore movement, improvisation and intertwined moments of creativity as a way to examine how autonomous moving systems can learn from dancers and how choreography can be expanded through the use of bodies beyond the human.
Student works for this concert were selected by an adjudication panel of students and faculty, and encompass dancers at different stages of their progression through the B.F.A. program.
The concert program can be found here.
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The VCUarts Dance 2021-2022 season, in particular the Charles O. Anderson residency, is supported in part by a generous grant from the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.