It’s Tamagawa Taiko time again!

Tamagawa 2013Truly one of the highlights of the Subaru Cherry Blossom Festival – the Tamagawa Taiko Drum and Dance group return to Philadelphia for a week of awe-inspiring performances.  Ready yourself for thundering drums, intricate dances, beautiful costumes and a whole lot of fun.

Taiko drumming has been a feature of the College’s dance offeringsfor nearly a decade, thanks largely to the efforts of Associate Professor of Dance  Kim Arrow . This event showcases the significant relationship between the College and Tamagawa University in Japan.  The renowned Tamagawa Taiko Drum and Dance Group return to Philadelphia for a week of performances. Heart-pounding drum rhythms intermingle with elegant dances in breath-taking fashion to create unforgettable memories. Experience the relentless energy and stunning visuals as Tamagawa takes you on a journey through ancient and modern Japan.

 

Please note: seating is limited and first-come-first-serve.

Free Admission
Swarthmore College, Lang Concert Hall
500 College Ave.
Swarthmore, PA 19081

 

Bryn Mawr Arts Series featuring Sheetal Gandhi (Contemporary choreography from the Indian diaspora…)

Bryn Mawr College Performing Arts Series Closes 2012-2013 Season with Tour-De-Force Performance by Sheetal Gandhi on March 22

 Final performance caps season of virtuosic and adventurous works in the arts

BRYN MAWR, PA – February 27, 2013 – The 2012-2013 season of the Bryn Mawr College Performing Arts Series concludes Friday, March 22 with Bahu-Beti-Biwi, a solo performance by intercultural, multi-disciplinary director, choreographer and performer Sheetal Gandhi. Reviewed as “striking” and “stunning” in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Gandhi incorporates elements of contemporary and traditional dance, dramatic multi-lingual vocalizations and percussive text to comment on the Indian diaspora and the traditional roles of women in India.

In Bahu-Beti-Biwi, which translates to Daughter-in-law, Daughter, Wife, movement and music create the transition between characters inspired by women from Gandhi’s life. The piece is influenced by North Indian musical traditions that are brought into a contemporary context. Humor and tension create a platform for scenes of freedom and compromise, desire and longing, duty and love. Gandhi has performed the work around the globe.

“Bryn Mawr, an all-women’s college, looks forward to presenting Sheetal Gandhi’s important take on the changing roles of women. Gandhi is a mesmerizing performer who both entertains and addresses challenging issues,” says Lisa Kraus, Coordinator of the Bryn Mawr College Performing Arts Series.

Thursday March 21
– 4-5:30 pm Master Class: Sheetal Ghandi (this is the time we traditionally use for this, as a class meets at this hour) – Pem Studio
Contemporary Kathak class which specifically focuses on learning the rhythms and the rhythmic cycles used in North Indian classical music, some technique from this form, and then a short traditional piece.  I show them how I translate the piece into a more contemporary language, and they learn this as well.  It is a speaking/dancing class.  I do this most often with students coming from a dance background. The rhythms can be learned by anyone, but when we get into the real choreography of it, it is better if they have some dance background.

– 7pm Lecture-demonstration   Aspects of  Ms. Gandhi’s experience moving from traditional forms and developing into a multi-disciplinary artist who works in a variety of theatrical contexts (possibly including screening of video clips).

Friday, March 22
-12-1:30 – Lunch in the Dorothy Vernon Room at Bryn Mawr for students of South Asian Women’s club and anyone interested in an informal meeting and discussion

-8 pm Performance: Bahu Beti Biwi – on McPherson Stage

Saturday March 23
-10:30 -12:00 am Community Class in Bollywood Dance (children and adults) – on McPherson Stage

Burn off steam in the contagiously fun fusion style of dance that is called, “Bollywood Dance”.  Each class offers an injury-preventative warm-up of body isolations, integrated with stretching and preparatory technical exercises for Indian dance movement.  Participants will:
  • learn traditional Indian styles based on both folk and classical forms
  • learn important story-telling skills through dance
  • learn choreography to popular Bollywood and Bhangra songs

-12:30 – 2:30 pm Workshop: These Embodied Voices – on McPherson Stage

This workshop is based on Liz Lerman techniques, exercises by Simone Forti, and Sheetal’s own artistic process as a multi-disciplinary story-teller.  The workshops focus on different ways of pairing text, song and sound with gesture to create meaningful and evocative, full-bodied stories. Participants work together and work alone to source material through improvisation, choreographic and theatrical structures, free-writing, research, and dialogue.  They may explore their cultural identities, histories, genders, and spiritual backgrounds as these subjects relate to the development of performance.

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Bryn Mawr’s Campus is located at 101 N. Merion Ave.  Tickets to individual events in the Bryn Mawr Performing Arts Series are $20 for general admission, $18 for seniors, $10 for students with ID and Dance Pass holders, and $5 for children under 12. Tickets and more information are available online at brynmawr.edu/arts/series.html or by calling 610-526-5210.

 

ABOUT SHEETAL GANDHI

Sheetal Gandhi is a veteran performer whose career has spanned genres and disciplines for the last fifteen years. She worked as a creator and performer in Cirque du Soleil’s Dralion, played a leading role in the Broadway production of Bombay Dreams and is featured on the original American cast album of Stephen Schwartz’s Children of Eden.  Most recently, Gandhi was the choreographer for Los Angeles based Cornerstone Theater Company’s first-ever musical, Making Paradise: The West Hollywood Musical.  Gandhi is a 2011 recipient of the prestigious C.O.L.A. grant, awarded by the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and a recent APPEX (Asian Pacific Performance Exchange) fellow, participating in a three week international artistic residency in Bali, Indonesia.  Gandhi’s solo and group work has been presented in theaters around the country including REDCAT (Los Angeles), Asia Society (New York), Mu Performing Arts (Minneapolis) and ODC Theater (San Francisco) as well as national and international Festivals including Black Magic Woman Theater Festival (Amsterdam), The National Asian American Theater Festival (New York), Bridges Choreographic Dialogs (Israel), Delhi International Arts Festival (India), Festival of Contemporary Dance (Mexico), and more.

DANCE MATTERS II: open call for papers

The School of Media, Communication and Culture at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India is inviting papers for a two-day symposium titled Dance Matters II: Frontiers of Performance Research.  The symposium will take place on July 19 and 20, 2013,  at Jadavpur University.   Selected papers from the symposium will be published in a book.  Jadavpur University will provide local hospitality for the speakers at the university guesthouse.  The event is sponsored by UGC University with Potential for Excellence Programme: Studies in Cultural Processes.

Cultures are dynamic. So the question arises: What should be preserved?  How do we know what is worth preserving? This conference will interrogate these fundamental issues with a focus on dance. India, now synonymous with change, was not long ago identified with age-old traditions and socio-economic stagnation. In this fervor for newness and change the culture of dance and performance is experiencing a vibrant revitalization. There is greater awareness of and exposure to dance through new media and the circulation of new and traditional dances from live performances to Bollywood, music videos, youtube and staged performances, as well as through the interconnected networks of artists, presenters, and consumers. These conditions have increased the visibility of Indian dance in global culture. As established categories of high, low, classical, folk, contemporary, and commercial dissolve under the democratizing forces of markets and modernity, questions surrounding cultural preservation, heritage, innovation, and authenticity surface as urgent issues of the twenty first century.  Art, culture, and history (despite contestations) connect communities to their past and help them to forge collective identities. But the rapid pace of culture change has negatively impacted some of the more enduring aspects of India’s performance traditions. Moreover, the Indian state’s lethargic attitude to cultural institutions and cultural policy continues to maintain the same bureaucratic power structures. As old buildings are demolished for new shopping malls, Bollywood item numbers crowd out every aspect of media and culture, and dance/art instrumentally connect to some politically correct social agenda, there is need to rethink and re-frame the place of dance and culture in the new Indian modernity. How can we re-imagine and renegotiate the old categories of performance research and infuse them with critique and analytical insight.

Dance and performance research have grown as an important interdisciplinary field of academic study in the past few decades.  Interestingly, questions on modernity and subjectivities in the humanities and social sciences in recent years have shifted from the predominance of text and textual theories to questions of the body, senses, emotion/affect, and visual culture. Dance scholarship has much to research in these arenas.  The recent scholarship on Indian dance has looked at dance in the context of postcolonial modernity, invention of tradition, national identity, critical history, subaltern historiography, diasporic identity, and gender and politics. Our previous conference titled “Dance Matters” and the anthology by the same name explored some of these key issues surrounding Indian dance and culture with an agenda of democratizing the inherent hierarchy and elitism associated with Indian dance both in theory and practice. This conference will build on the previous attempt at expanding the notion of performance research and deepen its scope by placing Indian dance at the frontlines of intellectual debates on culture, identity, and sociopolitical change as India plunges deeper into the messiness of markets and modernity.  Some of the areas that may be explored are:

  • The role of cultural heritage and preservation within the discourses of innovation and globalization.
  • Dance as art to dance as everyday cultural practice through ethnographic research and questions on subjectivity.
  • The vernacularization of the classical and the reshaping of the performance landscape by market forces and visual culture. What are the new contemporary hybrid performances?  Do they fit in the category of dance? who are the new performers/choreographers and the new audiences
  • The role of new authorities, institutions, and gatekeepers in India and the diaspora.
  • Integration of performance and culture with developmental agendas through community participation.
  • Impact of India’s economic growth and rapid urbanization on the folk dance traditions in villages.
  • Traditional aesthetics reshaped through new sensory experiences in various urban and rural landscapes.
  • Pedagogical shifts and the role of tradition and innovation in the expressions of embodiment, gender, and self identity.
  • New dance narratives impacting on past gender codes and questions of sexuality.  The renewed meaning of femininity and masculinity in contemporary dance culture.
  • Dance as a social medium of communication, spectacle (the recent trend of hundreds of dancers performing together), civic engagement, and political procession.

Please send a brief abstract (350 words) including a title, name, address, email, phone number and institutional affiliation by March 30, 2013. Submit abstracts and direct queries to:

Dr. Nilanjana Gupta, Coordinator,
School of Media Communication and Culture
Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India 700032
Email: nilaguptaju_at_yahoo.com

Dr. Pallabi Chakravorty
Department of Music and Dance
Swarthmore College, Pa 19096, U.S.A
Email: pchakra1_at_swarthmore.edu

Susan Foster! Susan Foster!

http://danceworkbook.pcah.us/susan-foster/index.html

Dr. Susan Foster is a Swarthmore alum, class of ’71, and the funding for this performance/lecture series was provided by The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. Dr. Linda Caruso Haviland (Bryn Mawr College Dance Program) was commissioned by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage to write this series of commentary on each event and the discussions they engendered within in the context of Dr. Foster’s body of work. Images and discussions can be found at this link.

Jane Comfort and Company 2/14-16/2013

The Department of Music and Dance at Swarthmore College and the William J. Cooper Foundation will present JANE COMFORT AND COMPANY on Friday, February 15th, 2013 at 8PM in the Swarthmore College Lang Performing Arts Center Pearson Hall Theatre. Here at Swarthmore her company presents two works:  Beauty and Underground River.  Beauty is a provocative dance theater piece that explores the American notion of female beauty through the lens of Barbie. The performance includes a Barbie beauty contest and an intimate encounter between Barbie and Ken. Underground River, described as a “risk-taking and profound theatrical tour de force,” is an exploration of the rich fantasy life of a girl who appears to be unconscious. Singing a cappella songs by Toshi Reagon and interacting with the magical visual creations of master puppeteer Basil Twist, the dancers dwell in a world of magic realism and eccentric beauty unseen by those who wish to make her “well.”

For the last 25 years, JANE COMFORT has created critically acclaimed, socially conscious dance theater. She has been on the front lines of dissent against the loss of gains for social justice since the Reagan revolution. JANE COMFORT is a choreographer, writer, and director based in New York City. She began creating her own interdisciplinary work in 1978, and has since created more than 45 original dance theatre works for Jane Comfort and Company. She has been produced throughout the United States, and in Europe and Latin America, and has been cited as “one of the most original choreographers on the downtown scene” by The Village Voice. Noted for her use of language, Comfort has been described as “far ahead of the curve” in experimenting with the intersection of text and movement.

JANE COMFORT AND COMPANY creates dance theater works that push the intersection of movement and language to a new form of theater. Called by the New York Times “a postmodernist pioneer in the use of verbal material in dance,” artistic director Jane Comfort addresses contemporary social and cultural issues with compassion and wit. The company is an extraordinary group of dancers, actors and singers whose multiple talents allow Jane Comfort to create deeply layered works utilizing a wide range of theatrical elements, from pure dance to chanted texts, a capella singing, film, lip-syncing, cross dressing, acted scenes and puppetry. The company creates theater in which transformation occurs through many voices.

JANE COMFORT AND COMPANY will also host a Master Class in the LPAC Troy Dance Studio (LPAC 002) on Thursday, February 14th from 4:30 – 6:00PM and a Workshop on Saturday, February 16th from 1:00 – 4:00 PM in the LPAC Troy Dance Studio (LPAC 002). These events are free and open to interested students, but please contact Professor Kim Arrow (karrow1@swarthmore.edu) at x8670 or email our administrative office at dance@swarthmore.edu.

Faculty Dance Concert 2/9/2013 at 8PM

Join the Swarthmore College dance program faculty for an evening of choreographic works on Saturday, February 9th at 8PM in the LPAC Pearson-Hall Theatre.  Selections include modern, flamenco, African, and much more with works for the dance faculty including Kemal Nance, Jumatatu Poe, Dolores Gmitter, Kim Arrow, Jon Sherman and visiting Cornell professor Kumudini Lakhia.

Goings on about town…

“9 Evenings: Collaborating on Human-Machine Intimacies”
by Ashley Ferro-Murray 
2pm panel 
Friday, January 18
Terrace Room of Cohen Hall, Perelman Quad at the University of Pennsylvania. 
Part of the larger “Intimate Collaborations” collaborations conference that accompanies the Phil Museum’s exhibition “Dancing Around the Bride: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Marcel Duchamp.”

Ashley Ferro-Murray is a doctoral candidate in performance studies with a designated emphasis in new media at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation looks at the importance of movement in the construction of digital subjectivities and is currently titledTactical Movement: Media-based choreography and Its Effect on Digital Culture. Ferro-Murray’s writing addresses dance history, dance studies, performance studies, new media studies, visual art, and art history. As a choreographer, Ferro-Murray reuses ordinary technologies toward re-conceiving issues of access and interaction in performance. Ferro-Murray has published book reviews with The Drama Review and Dance Research Journal. She has also been featured as a contributor on -empyre- new media list serve and In Media Res blog. Her choreography has been produced by Cornell University, University of California, Berkeley, The Milk Bar in Oakland, CA, and ZERO1 Biennial.

Dance Lab showing Monday 12/10

Please join the students of DANC 011 for the end-of-semester Dance Lab Showings
Monday, December 10
5:30pm
LPAC Troy Dance Studio
From the students: Throughout Dance Lab I, we worked with various concepts (time, space, rhythm, intention, improvisation) to help us create dance studies throughout the semester . This class has left us with more questions than answers as we sought to find our own unique voices through movement, using these different pathways to spark our discovery. This showing highlights some of the work we created throughout this choreographic process.
Join us Monday to see and discuss the work of students Leanne Browne, Bryan Chen, Daniel Cho, Akure Imes, and Laura Lederman.