VCUarts Dance + Choreography presents Énouement: Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 Senior Project Concerts. All performances are FREE.
Spring 2023 event dates
Friday, April 14th, 2023, location and time TBD (Elise Cumberbatch, Nina Loree).
Friday, April 21st, 2023 @ The Trail of the Enslaved, time TBD (Ashanti Brantley).
Fall 2022 Event Dates (Past)
Reserve tickets for November 18th and 19th by emailing dance@vcu.edu.
Friday, November 11th, 8:00pm @ The Anderson Gallery, 907 ½ W. Franklin St (LA Morgan).
Friday, November 18th, and Saturday, November 19th, 7:30pm @ The Grace St Theatre, 934 W. Grace Street (Simone Grant, Trinity Hughes, Misha Joao, Justine Anonuevo, Amelia Virtue, Frederick Williams).
Énouement is a collection of the Seniors’ undergraduate projects that includes 10 original works created by this cohort of emerging artists.
Énouement depicts the bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turned out while simultaneously knowing your past self is somewhere, still eagerly awaiting the news.’ The journey this class has taken together has been turbulent, yet we have stuck together and celebrated one another through unimaginable spirals. The word ‘Énouement’ was carefully chosen to encapsulate our experiences as we reflect on our journey and appreciate the growth, realizations and knowledge we have amassed both collectively and individually. This production is the culmination of four years of rigorous training in both the physical and creative research aspects of dance. We have spent countless hours curating an experience that represents us as individuals and as a class” – Senior Project Students
Justine Anonuevo’s work, Catalyst: Pyro, explores the singular question, “How can a mass of people move as one entity?” In the creative process, Anonuevo investigates how individual movements can feel like a singular organism within a collective action. This work is based on Anonuevo’s own artistic journey and is representative of the transformation of self that happens through loss and success.
In the dance film De la beauté et de l’unité, presented at the Grace Street Theater, Simone Grant explores the beauty of self, community and sisterhood. Simone uses the medium of film to break the fourth wall of the spectator viewing, thus allowing the audience to step outside of the theater frame and into an alternative mosaic world. In this unconventional world, the ethereal connections provide a unique reflection of one’s lived experiences and enhances the sense of self within a much larger ecosystem. Using a fusion of distinct dance vocabularies, Simone explores the balance between simplicity and complexity, and invites the audience to experience these encounters through the lens of the camera that guides the viewer through this surreal world of kinship.
Trinity Hughes’ Path of Intersection explores how people in a given society are on individual journeys throughout their lives and how those journeys intersect. She delves into the unique experiences and stories that direct a person’s path by exploring three questions: What are the choices we make to determine our paths; What are forces that cause our paths to cross and how do these intersections impact our future? With a cast of six dancers, Hughes’ choreography explores kinetic connections and the development of relationships over the arc of the work.
Misha Joao seeks to navigate her entangled, serpentine lived experiences as a bicultural individual through The State of Being Many. Although the roots of the work are based on personal experiences, the crafting is grounded in the process of excavation that Misha and the cast of dancers have embarked on together. Here, the goal isn’t to find concrete answers but to reflect upon the discoveries and stories that reveal themselves along the way.
In the choreographic event, With Eyes From Both Sides, L.A. Morgan creates an immersive work in a site-specific space that guides the audience through a variety of thought-provoking environments of varying levels, energies and textures. The landscape of these environments reflect upon the timeline of the choreographer’s life and envelops the audience in such a way that they can experience aspects of Morgan’s innermost self – her fantasies, disappointments, hopes and aspirations. To create a more natural overall atmosphere, L.A. uses choreographic elements of realism and as well as the dancers’ individuality to bring their own authenticity to the work.
The work Illusory Evidence is based on the following questions that Amelia Virtue asks about her own experiences in ballet, “How do you feel?” “What are you thinking?” These questions have remained with her throughout years of training as a ballet dancer. In this work, Virtue investigates the possibilities of how she and her cast use their agency as “thinking” artists, individually and collectively, to interrogate and deconstruct aspects of ballet. Here, Virtue recognizes and honors the value of ballet as a beautiful and complex art form that can exist beyond a specific set of ideas. She invites the audience to embrace their own interpretation of the work.
Archive 221942 is an exploration of an unfamiliar experience in an unknown space. Frederick Williams explores a new universe resulting from an event that changes the world. The work follows the journey through the eyes of the six dancers and how they maneuver through this new world together by fostering new connections that allow for growth individually and collectively. Here, choreographer Williams aims to highlight the importance of community support which serves as a fundamental asset of humanity to help each other heal and move forward when in crisis, which debunks the individualistic idea that you must fight every battle alone. Using dynamic physical and social connections of the artists on stage, the work examines healing as a collective effort fostered through the support of one another and community.