Dance Spectrum provides dance majors with an opportunity to hone their craft by working with guest artists and dance faculty on challenging repertory in an atmosphere that is professional in nature.Contemporary Ballet choreographer and Princess Grace Awardee Gabrielle Lamb is this semester’s guest choreographer.
Fall 2019 Dance Spectrum in Concert
December 5-7 @ 8 PM nightly, December 7 @ 2 PM
Gaertner Performing Arts Center Dance Theater
The Sam Houston State University Department of Dance will present an evening of faculty and guest artists works the first weekend of December in the GPAC Dance Theater. Highlights from this concert include faculty works by Joshua Manculich, Dana Nicolay, Andy Noble, Dionne Noble, and Donald Shorter. Visiting professor Adele Nickel will also present a new work on the concert. Original works by two guest artists, Gabrielle Lamb and Rohan Bhargava, round out the evening. Come join us for an exhilarating evening of contemporary dance!
Guest Artist Features X2
SHSU Dance is happy to welcome Gabrielle Lamb to campus as one of this semester's guest artists in residency. Gabrielle Lamb, winner of a 2014 Princess Grace Award for Choreography, is a New York City-based choreographer and dancer. Born in Savannah, Georgia, she was trained at the Boston Ballet School and joined Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal in 2000, earning her soloist promotion in 2003. Her movement style and theatricality have been profoundly influenced by the choreographers whose work she danced during her performing career, including George Balanchine, Jiri Kylian, Mats Ek, Ohad Naharin, Nacho Duato, and Shen Wei. Lamb will create an original dance work on SHSU dance majors that will premiere in Dance Spectrum.
NY choreographer, Rohan Bhargava, who is originally from New Delhi, India, worked with SHSU Dance in September to set The Underground on a cast of ten dancers. SHSU Dance performed this work in the 10th Anniversary of The Dance Gallery Festival TX in October and will be showcasing it again on Dance Spectrum. Bhargava expresses that this dance "ventures into the joy and paranoia intrinsic to balancing love and lust in 21st-century party culture."
Faculty Contributions
Joshua Manculich will present two works for this Fall's concert - Ride, an ensemble work for six dancers, and Align, a duet that will be performed by a different couple each night. Of Ride, Manculich states: "I attempted to embody the drive, pulse, and intensity of composer Julia Wolfe's Dark Full Ride: I., a percussion quartet with four drum sets. It is up to the audience to interpret, curate, and define any particular "meaning" for the work. The alley of light within the work suggests containment and influences the dancers use of space. Like the music, the work increases with intensity - requires precision - and feels like a sprint to the finish line." Through complex, intertwining partnering steps, the duet Align looks at how we parallel the facets, values, and aspirations of the self with an ever changing world. Can we align our actions to support our purpose?
Professor Emeritus Dana Nicolay will also present two works on the concert. Anthem is a work originally created in 1991 in honor of the lives lost during the Tiananmen Square protests in China in 1989. This year marks the 30th anniversary of that historic democratic uprising and Nicolay thought it pertinent to put the dance work on stage once again. His second work of the evening, Intermezzi features the beautiful music of Johannes Brahms and a dance that pulls back the curtain on interpersonal relationships. The six performers provide the audience with detailed picturesque moments that feel somehow familiar and utterly relatable.
Andy Noble, will present Of Mud and Marrow, a work for nine dancers set to the dissonant yet harmonic string music by composer Christopher Cerrone. Inspired by the emotionally luminous musical score, Noble created a serene landscape that is broken up with intense moments of frenzied activity. For this work, the movement feels other-worldly and primordial in nature and the dancers seem to go through a transformation as if shedding their skin in search of something better. This work will be performed in January to live music by Kinetic Ensemble in an evening of dance and live music at The MATCH in downtown Houston.
A dance for twenty female dancers and long transformative skirts, Dionne Noble's newest work explores hints of rebellion and disruption against the common assumptions of the female image. Gorgeous innovation went into the designing of the paneled skirts by Barry Doss that were constructed to fall between looks such as a high-fashion halter dress to a restrictive, wrapped garment to an untamable, wild flurry of fabric. As the dress transforms, so does the dance.
A grid is placed upon the stage floor to box in Donald Shorter's From Scratch. This playful, abstract work for sixteen dancers set ups a playground like atmosphere whereby the dancers navigate intricate pathways and explore choreographic tasks that include gesture and improvisation. In visiting professor Adele Nickel's new work, the dancers move to the sound of a metronome and march, run or fall through space - hoping to be caught. Nickel states, "Forecast exists in the tension between order and chaos, pattern and discord, the things we can control and the things we can't." Both Shorter's and Nickel's work play with question ideas and values associated with form in their own unique ways.
DETAILS
Dance Spectrum in Concert
James and Nancy Gaertner Performing Arts Center, Dance Theater
815 17thStreet, Huntsville, TX
December 5-7, 2019 @ 8pm, December 7, 2019 @ 2 PM
Tickets: $12 advance general admission, $15 at the door, student RUSH available week of the show (one free ticket) for current SHSU students with valid SHSU student ID.
Purchase online at http://www.shsutickets.com or call 936-294-2339
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