Twenty-one rising young dance artists from York University’s Department of Dance, School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design (AMPD), will premiere their riveting new solos, duets and ensemble works at this year’s Dance Innovations performance.
From Nov. 23 to 25, Dance Innovations: Up Rising will showcase the work of dance students under the direction of Faculty member Julia Sasso, with choreography instruction by Freya Olafson.
Up Rising reflects the imagination, artistry, courage and integrity of AMPD students, faculty and staff, and is dedicated in memory of Professor Emerita Penelope Reed Doob and alumna Selina Margaret Twum.
Dancers present these new works in this performance:
• Hailey Cook – Fragile Balance explores the struggle to achieve stability without obliteration.
• Dylan Caetano – Seven explores negative emotions combining forces to create one entity.
• Shayla Lewis – Has a capricious thought or feeling ever popped into your head at the most unpredictable time? ChAos has the potential to undermine human behaviour, but it can be controlled – exploration and free will is still an option.
• Holly Buckridge – How you appear to the outside world is just one side of who you truly are. OPIA explores identity in two halves: the light and the dark; the observed and the hidden.
• Evan Winther – Investigating “in-between” places and periods of transition, paper-thin coat is an exploration of memory and the past lives of one person across multiple generations and timelines.
• Ashlyn Kuy – Sound Interpreters is a visual embodiment of music. If you could not hear the music, would you still see it? If you plugged your ears, would you still understand?
• Eleanor Martin (exchange student from Chichester, U.K.) – Martin investigates conformity at its most vicious. OH BROTHER! delves into the depths of strict gender roles and the social trends of the 1950s era.
• Serwaa Daley – An exploration of the rave-goer’s mind on psychedelics combined with exhaustion from dancing the night away, Acid House is an experimental work that pays tribute to the underground house subculture of the mid-’80s to -’90s.
• Nicole Robb – Stripping The Membrane investigates the simplicity and intricacies of the human body’s largest organ.
• María Lucía Llano – Through complex physicality and movement patterns, Filter reveals the different neurological connections that influence human activity and emotions.
• Liam Ellington – Z.F.P is a choreographic work that aims to embody the emotions an individual feels as she works through an internal problem.
• Sophie Dow – Long-necked, ship-wrecked, terrified swans, Parasol enters a lavish, melodramatic world of the bourgeois. Washed in red, four “childish queens” are hypnotized and driven to madness by a burning passion and desire for power that will stop at nothing to bask in the spotlight.
• Tara Simmonds (Eechange student from Chichester, U.K.) – Prophecy is a predicted future that is never revealed until the final moment. What occurs in a journey toward the foreseen?
• Connie Oreamuno – T(he)y, Me, Us, I follows two individuals through a turbulent relationship of interdependence.
• Angela Wells – Puzzled is an exploration of how different movements fit together.
• Teadora Paluzzi – exploratio (Latin, for exploration) delves into four elements of dance: shape, space, time and energy. Together with music, the elements are depicted in patterns and movement phrases.
• Meghan Van Der Giessen – Destruction explores the severed relationship between humanity and Earth. It is up to us to stop the ongoing spiral of annihilation.
• Lindsay McBride – Dear Mother acknowledges the constant strain between Mother Nature and humanity. Why must we always take advantage of those who give us life?
• Nina Milanovski – fish[I] is a quartet that began as an autobiographical self-solo. The piece investigates duality and authenticity and how these relate to identity. Can movement be authentic to one’s self? Does your identity affect the way you move?
• Vanessa Boutin – Apperception examines the effects of negativity on the mind. Personal experiences inform and ignite the work’s intensity; the intensity born of one’s deepest, darkest thoughts.
• Natasha Smith – Before there was nothing, which then became everything. Om is the sound that created and is the universe, but what was there before? Playing with the contrast between “before and after,” Create explores what our universe is created from.
Dance Innovations: Up Rising runs at the McLean Performance Studio, 244 Accolade East Building, York University. The cost to attend is $12 to $18. For tickets and information call the box office at 416-736-5888 or visit the box office online.
Performance dates and times include:
Thursday, Nov. 23 and Friday, Nov. 24
Program A – 7pm
Program B – 8:30pm
Saturday, Nov. 25
Program A – 1pm
Program B – 2:30pm