On Thursday, October 5th, Alonzo King Lines Ballet will perform at 8pm in the LPAC Pearson-Hall Theater. The event is free and open to the public.

A dancer has one, overarching goal when he or she steps onto the stage: to make it all look easy. No one wants to go see a ballet or contemporary performance to watch the dancers grimace and express to the audience the difficulty of what they are doing or the amount of pain they are in. The best dancers can make the hardest steps look easy, but it is their hard work and training that makes the choreography look this way. They have to battle the choreography and challenge themselves to give off a certain image.

Alonzo King works differently. The founder and artistic director of Alonzo King Lines ballet, he creates works that adhere to a specific stylistic goal: fluidity. He makes his dancers move in ways that accept and romanticize the human form, rather than breaking it into rigid techniques, as classical ballet does. His dancers barely look solid as they dance, and one is not constantly reminded of how uncomfortable the movements are or how difficult it is for the dancers. This is not to say that his pieces are easy to dance. They are incredibly difficult and require nearly perfect technique. But they are breathtaking because they look so fluid and unrestrained.

His company will be performing Biophony and The Propelled Heart. Biophony is a collaboration between Alonzo King, natural soundscape artist Bernie Krause, and composer Richard Blackford. For years, Krause made recordings of the natural world, from the sounds of killer whales to the gentle hum of the earth itself. The dancers take on animal form to remind us of the beauty that comes with a connection to the natural world.

The Propelled Heart is a celebration of the human voice. The performances is oriented around the vocalist Lisa Fischer, who has shared the stage with Mick Jagger, Beyoncé, Sting, Aretha Franklin, and more. Her voice is astoundingly powerful, and King wished to pay tribute to this. He explores the “kinetics” of the human voice, and his dancers make visual Ms. Fischer’s soaring music.

Gabriel Hearn-Desautels ’20

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!

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

touching

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

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.

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

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

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

“An evening of Kathak dance, 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 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.

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.

The 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 Department of Music and Dance sends a warm invitation to all! This Fall concert will feature dances 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.