Certainty and ambiguity. Connections and solitude. Transformation and stillness. These are some of the contrasting themes explored in “The Spaces Between,” this year’s Winter Dance Concert.
Thirty-one dancers will perform in 10 original pieces choreographed by students and faculty. Performances are set for March 5-8 at 7:30 p.m. and March 8 at 2 p.m. in the Yulman Theater.
“Through movement, our dancers navigate these intermediate spaces, embracing change, discovery and the complexities of human experience,” said Laurie Zabele Cawley, the WDC’s artistic director and interim director of dance.
Senior choreographers, clockwise from left, are Sage Stinson, Sarah DeRosa, Livi Gwinnett, Abby Wilder, Vaishali Srinivasan, Anabel Sollinger, Grace Newcombe and Jolita Brettler.
“We are particularly fortunate to be working with Erika Pûjic, founding member and rehearsal director of Battleworks Dance Company, who is setting a work by the esteemed choreographer Robert Battle.”
Battle, the visionary founder of his eponymous company, served as artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater for over a decade and is currently the resident choreographer for the Paul Taylor Dance Company.
Pûjic is a senior lecturer at Skidmore College. In addition to her special staging of “Battleworks Etude,” eight student choreographers, all seniors, will present dances that reflect their research of their own “spaces between.”
Sage Stinson, a psychology major with minors in dance and anthropology, uses ballet and jazz movements to illustrate her theme of “how the passage of time in relationships does not diminish their significance.”
Abby Wilder’s piece was inspired by the isolation and insecurity she felt as a queer teenager in a heteronormative dance space, “and how finding community at Union has transformed my relationship with movement and with my identity.”
A dual major in mathematics and sociology with minors in data analytics and dance, Wilder found that having a stage, a passionate cast and support to tell her story “has been an incredibly fulfilling and empowering experience that I could have never imagined at the age of 13.”
Theater major and dance minor Jolita Brettler also drew upon indelible childhood memories for her choreography. Having grown up on the border of East Harlem, N.Y., she created “Lucid Dreams on 96th St.” as an homage to all the early mornings and late nights she spent on the 6 train platform as it delivered her home or prepared her for other journeys.
“96th Street is the space between my world and the world next door,” Brettler said. “I shared a train stop with people making amounts of money inconceivable to me, and neighbors who worked long hours and struggled to make ends meet. In this gap where we were often stacked on top of each other, I found that the automation of this daily transaction robbed us all of something very valuable: the ability to truly be with each other.”
Other student choreographers are Sarah DeRosa, Livi Gwinnett, Grace Newcombe, Anabel Sollinger and Vaishali Srinivasan.
Cawley’s “Penumbra” emerged from studying family photographs from the 1930s and ‘40s and being “struck by the profound absence of stories – stories about love, relationships, and the bonds they shared with one another and their community.
“The photos held a frozen moment in time, but without context or memory, what remains? ‘Penumbra’ is a reflection on the spaces left behind when memory fades, and how even in loss there remains a shadow, a lingering echo of what was once there.”
WDC associate director Hetti Vyrine Barnhill, visiting assistant professor of theater and dance, is an award-winning filmmaker, director, choreographer who founded Create A Space NOW, an interactive platform that uses art to challenge bias, racism and systemic oppression. Her work, “It Will Pay Off,” was inspired by her mother’s belief that a strong work ethic will reap benefits.
Barnhill’s mother’s lived experience of that belief – as a single Black mother who put herself through school while working in the legal and education sectors – was carried down from her own mother, one of the first Black surgical nurses hired at a hospital during a time when segregation was still legal and actively practiced in many states.
“My work examines how the value of hard work is shaped and often dictated by factors such as sex, gender, class, religion, and most definitely race,” Barnhill said. “It explores how the reward for labor can be granted, withheld, or even dismantled based on who is doing the work.”
The Winter Dance Concert features original costume and lighting designs created in collaboration with the Department of Theater and Dance faculty, staff and students.
Tickets are $15 for general admission and $5 with a Union ID (students, faculty, alumni), and senior citizens. They are available online here, and in person from the Yulman Theater Box Office, open 1-2 p.m. Monday through Friday.
The concert runtime is approximately 65 minutes.