The Department of Dance at The College at Brockport presents performances of Danscore on Thursday and Friday, November 16 and 17, at the Hartwell Dance Theater in Hartwell Hall on The Brockport campus and on Saturday, November 18, at the Hochstein Performance Hall, 50 North Plymouth Avenue, Rochester. All performances begin at 7:30 p.m. Ticket prices for all performances are $17/General, $12/Seniors, College at Brockport Alumni, Faculty and Staff, and $9/Student. Tickets are available online at fineartstix.brockport.edu, by phone at (585) 395-2787 or at the Tower Fine Arts Center Box Office, 180 Holley Street, Brockport. The performance at Hochstein will be followed by an on-stage wine and cheese reception. Only cash and checks will be accepted at the door at Hochstein, though credit cards can be used for tickets purchased in advance.
The Department of Dance is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a semester-long focus on dance icon Trisha Brown. Funded with a New York State DanceForce grant, the project includes participation by three early Trisha Brown Dance Company members, including project director and Brockport dance faculty member Mariah Maloney, along with Irene Hultman and Vicky Shick. The three have restaged Brown’s classic “Set and Reset/Reset” using students from Brockport’s nationally renowned dance department.
The Trisha Brown Dance Company premiered “Set and Reset” in 1983 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It is the company’s signature work and confirmed Trisha Brown as a leader of abstract choreography. According to Maloney, “for the creation of ‘Set and Reset/Reset,’ the students are an integral part of both the creative process and the end result.” Maloney, Hultman and Shick have taught each of the dancers exact sequences from the original choreography and later guided them through an extensive improvisation process that utilized the same set of instructions that Brown gave to her dancers in 1983: “Keep it simple, act on instinct, stay on the edge, work with visibility and invisibility, and get in line.” The Danscore version of “Set and Reset/Reset” is a combination of the original and the student choreography.
The Doug Varone and Dancers company is also well-represented on this year’s Danscore program. One of Varone’s former dancers, Julia Burrer, has joined the Brockport dance faculty and will be showing a piece. Another faculty member, Stevie Oakes, will be joining another former Varone dancer Adriane Fang in “Last Good Thing,” a duet made to celebrate both powerful and subtle movement possibilities choreographed by Elizabeth Shea.
Oakes will also be reconstructing Fang’s “conflict/Resolve” from its original duet form to a trio, providing the opportunity for students to engage with the rigor of professional choreography inside a workshop setting. The three dancers explore various manifestations of conflict in the body through a dynamic and physically rigorous palette of movements which illustrate the binding pressure of conflict and the release of resolution.
Interim Department of Dance chairperson James Hansen, whose work has been acclaimed by The New York Times, will restage his “Lovely” which had its premiere at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. The piece is performed to music by Cher and Frank Sinatra, but also includes text from the classic game show “The Newlywed Game” and snippets of 1950s instructional filmstrips for high school students regarding hygiene and how to be popular.
Hansen’s interest in these videos was piqued when he realized “what was acceptable in terms of gender roles and social expectations was so rigidly defined [then]. After initially laughing at how ludicrous these films seem today … I was horrified by what the generation exposed to them experienced, and I began to have more of an understanding of the sometimes vast gap between my generation and the generation before me in terms of social liberalism.”
Two of the department’s in-house troupes have new artistic directors this season, both of whom will also be showing work in the Danscore concert. Jenise Anthony will be heading up the Sankofa African Dance and Drum Ensemble while Jennifer Weber is spearheading the Chamber Ballet Brockport ensemble.
“We are in an exciting era at the Brockport dance department, returning to the original mission of Danscore, which was to present the best in modern dance in Western New York,” Hansen, who is also serving as artistic director for the concert, said. “I’m thrilled that we are highlighting our significant New York City connections through internationally recognized guest artists.”
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