Author Archives: twebb1

Feeling in the dark about your choreography ? Take Lighting Design!

If you look around, lighting adds impact to our visual world in movies, television architecture, interior design, special events, and so much more! This class is intended to demystify light as a powerful medium in design and familiarize students with design fundamentals. The course objective introduces lighting concepts with a focus on lighting for theater and dance, but the skills are applicable to many areas and other majors. This hands-on class guides you artistically through the design process from start to finish. The course is designed to serve all students regardless of prior experience in theater or dance production.
Fulfills a general requirement for all theater majors and minors.
Humanities. Register for THEA 004B.

Class meets Mondays 1PM – 3:45PM LPAC 310 Discussion followed by hands-on lab from 4:15PM -6:15PM with James Murphy, Managing Director of the LPAC.
1 credit.
Catalog chapter: Theater
Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/department-theater

Contact Jean Tierno (jtierno1@swarthmore.edu) or Jim Murphy (jmurphy2@swarthmore.edu) for more info!

HOOP OF LIFE: Music and Dance from Ojibwa/Oneida with Ty Defoe (4/24 at 4:30PM)

HOOP OF LIFE with Ty Defoe/ Gi izhig (Oneida/Ojibwe Nations)Ty_Defoe

This event will include interactive tribal songs and flute, hoop, and eagle dances. This unique program explores stories within a framework of traditional and contemporary culture, history, and values. Ty draws on his vast repertoire gifted to him weaves urban anecdotes and teachings that can be applied to ideas of shape-shifting and how this relates to identity. Walking in multiple worlds on earth is what Ty carries as he  weaves stories and humanity together. Storytelling is often discovered with a presenting a message. For example the Sacred Hoop Dance is a metaphor that gives a message of people creating unity. The four colors of the hoops are symbols of interdependence and unity – the four human races, the four seasons, the four directions of the compass. As the Hoops move they speak of renewed creation of all of the universe.

Upper Tarble

4:30-6PM

April 24, 2018

https://swatcentral.swarthmore.edu/?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D288012818 

2017 Spring Dance Concert

Friday, April 28 at 4:30 PM – 6:30 PM 

Saturday, April 29 at 8PM

The Swarthmore College Dance Program presents the 2017 Spring Dance Concert. Wonderful work from our African, Ballet, Modern, Kathak and Tap repertory classes will all be included this year. Several pieces feature live music, video, and singing! Come celebrate our graduating seniors and the hard work of all our dance students and faculty. The concert, which is appropriate for all ages, is free and open to the public. This show is uplifting and joyful!

Touching: An Honors Choreography Project by Erica Janko ’17

Sunday, April 30 at 2 PM – 5 PM in LPAC Troy Dance Lab

jankotouchingpostertouching

you are encased by arms. it is soft, warm, dark.
soft hums reverberate through you. you echo,
finding skin, rotating forward.
touching, we are safe, we know. we follow by sight, touch
memory,
force.
we make sound.
we don’t know who is leading anymore.

The Department of Music and Dance presents an Honors Choreography Project choreographed and directed by Erica Janko ’17. This multimedia, experimental dance production explores embodiments of group form.

*Please note that there may be loud vocalizations from the performers during the show.

A talkback will follow each performance.

Directed and choreographed by Erica Janko ‘17
Set and media design by Yoshifumi Nomura ‘17
Lighting design by Clarissa Phillips ‘19
Costume design by Rebecca Rosenthal ‘20
Video design by Chiara Kruger ‘17

Guest Lecture: Amanda Weidman, Cultural Anthropologist.

Monday, April 17 at 2:30 PM – 4 PM

Location: SCI 104

Amanda Weidman is a cultural anthropologist whose work in Tamil-speaking South India has centered on gender, technological mediation, music, sound, and performance. She is the author of a book on the social history of Karnatic (South Indian) classical music, Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India (Duke Univ. Press, 2006). Her current research project is on playback singing in the South Indian Tamil-language film industry. She is also a Karnatic violinist.

Playback singing in Indian popular cinema is more than simply a technical process of substituting one voice for another; rather, it is a culturally and historically specific phenomenon that has generated novel forms of vocal sound and performance practice, celebrity and publicity, and affective attachment to voices. I situate these forms within the cultural and political context of South India from the post-Independence period to the post-Liberalization present. I examine the discourses and practices that were generated when playback singing first emerged and became standard practice in the 1940s-50s, the aesthetics that became normalized in the 1960s as certain voices began to dominate, and the ways the status and vocal sound of playback singers have changed since the liberalizing reforms of the 1990s.

Free and open to the Swarthmore community.

Amanda Weidman 2 rescheduled

The Cambrians presents Clover

The Cambrians presents CLOVER sponsored by The Department of Music and Dance and the William J. Cooper Foundation at Swarthmore College.Cambrians

The Cambrians is an intimate contemporary dance and storytelling venture created in collaboration by Benjamin Wardell, Michel Rodriquez Cintra and Melinda Jean Myers. The Cambrians [KAYM-bree-uns] is a global dance production network, based out of Chicago, that treats its dance performers as the primary drivers of choreographic quality and innovation.

PERFORMANCE
Friday, March 17, 2017
8:00PM
LPAC Pearson-Hall Theater (Main Stage).

COMPANY MASTER CLASSES
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
11:30AM and 4:30PM
LPAC Boyer Dance Studio
And,
Thursday, March 16, 2017
11:20AM
LPAC Boyer Dance Studio

Courtyard Dancers presents “120 Square Feet”

Asian Arts Initiative March 25th 6:00pm to 7:00pm

“An evening of Kathak daSlide1nce, video, and community engagement. We are a grassroots organization in Philadelphia but our roots travel far to a little-known location where dance thrives among the underprivileged. Please join us to support the community arts initiative at Subhasgram in the outskirts of Kolkata.”

Sydney Dance Company (2/24 @ 8PM, LPAC)

Sydney Dance Company is the most renowned contemporary dance company in Australia. The company has performed across the globe in venues such as the Sydney Opera House, the Joyce Theater in New York, the Shanghai Grand Theatre, and the Stanislavsky in Moscow, and is the first Western contemporary dance company to perform in the People’s Republic of China. The company is known for its dancers’ high level of technical ability; its integrity and precision as an ensemble; the choreography of its director, Spanish-born Rafael Bonachela; and the international array of its visiting artists. Bonachela’s 2 One Another won Australian Dance Awards in 2013 for choreography and for performance by a company.
LPAC Pearson Hall Theatre
8PM
February 24, 2017
Free and Open to the public. No reservations or tickets needed. Seating is first come, first served.

SYDNEYPosterFinal
In addition to the Friday evening performance on Thursday, Feb. 23, 2017, Sydney Dance Company will offer a Q and A discussion with the company from noon—1 p.m in the Boyer Dance Studio ande, a Master Class from 4:30-6 p.m. in the Troy Lab Studio both in the Lang Performing Arts Center. These are designed for interested intermediate and advanced dance students to learn choreography from the company’s repertory pieces.

 

Prof. Olivia Sabee debuts choreography in DC (12/10 @ Dance Place)

2016_1023_agoradance_thekindofthing_cleanimage_v1The Kind of Thing That Would Happen, a new piece by Olivia Sabee, at Washington DC’s Dance Place 

The Kind of Thing That Would Happen asks the audience whether or not they believe what they are seeing and harks back to Aristotle’s precept of theater as making real not what has happened, but rather, the kind of thing that would happen. The performance—with choreography by Olivia Sabee, original sound designs by DeLesslin George-Warren, and new sets by Ben Levine—features choreography that ranges from happy-go-lucky dances to contemplative solo work set to a rhythmically driving score, as the enduring love of the main characters unfolds, interwoven with monologues from an inquisitive, insightful poetess.

The Kind of Thing That Would Happen
December 10 at 8 p.m. and December 11 at 7 p.m.
3225 8th St. NE, Washington, DC.
Running time: 45 minutes with no intermission

Fall 2016 Dance Concert (12/2 + 12/3)

The Department of Music and Dance sends a warm invitation to all! This Fall concert will feature fall-dance-concert-posterdances and music from a variety of styles and from various cultural traditions including Ballet, Taiko, Modern, Tap and more!

Come celebrate our students and faculty with this joyous end of the semester showcase. Free and open to the public. All ages are welcome.

LPAC Pearson-Hall Theater

Friday 12/2 4:30PM
Saturday 12/3 8PM

There is a “Talk Back” Q & A panel immediately following the Saturday show. Please join Professor K. Elizabeth Stevens from the Department of Theater for a moderated discussion about dance.