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CrossCurrents Dance Company Performing May 30th & 31st at Dance Place
On Saturday, May 30th at 8:00 p.m. and Sunday, May 31st at 7:00 p.m., CrossCurrents Dance Company presents Crossing Boundaries, Creating Currents at Dance Place, 3225 8th Street, NE, Washington, DC 20017, 202-269-1600. Tickets can be purchased online at www.danceplace.org ($22 general admission; $17 members, students, seniors, artists, teachers; $8 children 17 and under). For more information, contact Debra Kanter at 301 254-3260.
Now in its 13th season, the Bethesda-based dance company is boldly tackling subjects from war to the nature of sacred space in our lives. The concert will feature works by company members, local choreographer Tiffany Haughn and New York City-based guest artist Sarah A.O. Rosner. Also included will be a special performance of the work of Meisha Bosma and Julia Smith by Joy of Motion Dance Center’s award winning Youth Dance Ensemble under the direction of Helen Hayes.
“CrossCurrents Dance Company is opening new channels for artistic voices to take root and flourish,” proclaimed artistic director Debra Kanter. “We are proud to nurture established and emerging choreographers and dancers from our home at the Joy of Motion Dance Center while extending a hand to emerging choreographers and dancers in Baltimore and New York City.”
Kanter and company member Katharine Mardirosian are directing Upon These Walls, a work that utilizes set choreography and improvisation. The piece explores the parameters of “sacred space,” and how we as individuals and members of a community come together to define what is sacred. Finding sacred space can be both a personal as well as a collective journey, existing in the psyche while being firmly attached to the material world of artifacts, etchings and stories created and shared among cultures.
Inspired by letters and interviews of American soldiers who fought in the Iraq War, Tiffany Haughn will present Unsung. This emotionally provocative and timely piece portrays the heart-wrenching story of the war and its aftermath from a soldier’s perspective. The false intentions of leaders, the gradual dehumanization of an individual when called upon to kill, the numbness and inability to adapt back home and the burden of survivor’s guilt are just some of the themes tackled in this gripping work. “I was compelled to create this work,” said Haughn. “Although my inspiration is specifically the Iraq war, I hope that the dance is timeless and universal and can tell the story of any war and any soldier.”
Sarah A.O. Rosner, director of the New York based A.O. Movement Collective (AOMC) www.theaomc.org, will present an excerpt of a larger work in process, 13 Variations on a Car Crash. The piece explores the grotesque beauty of wreckage – mechanical, emotional, and visceral. Full of AOMC’s signature hard falls and heavy partnering, “13 V” follows two once-lovers through a wasteland of crashes, memories, grocery lists, and scrap metal. “My main goal is to create evocative reinventions of the human experience – works that investigate the intricacy, wreckage, compassion, and mess inherent in the ways we live our lives,” noted Rosner, a recent graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and recipient of Dance Theatre Workshop’s Van Lier Fellowship.
On Saturday’s program, the Junior Company of the Youth Dance Ensemble will perform University of Maryland faculty member, Julia Smith’s, Au Revoir. This sextet addresses loss, grief and moving forward. The choreographer draws upon the loss of her own father to teach these young dancers the lessons of ‘dance theater.’
On Sunday’s program, the Senior Company of the Youth Dance Ensemble will perform local dance luminary, Meisha Bosma’s, Hawk. This piece was created for the company’s four high school dancers earlier this winter. Some searches are energized by an unstoppable drive. We stand firmly in our place only for a short time, and then restlessness sets in. Soon we are off again, soaring like a hawk, hunting down the next big search for something more, something bigger, something greater from within. Hawk is a powerful female quartet that mysteriously explores the nature of tunnel-vision in these restless searches.
Baltimore based Charlie Birch will present Narrow Bog/Furnish Joint, a piece that aims to demonstrate the assumption that we are all connected. In some instances we are acutely aware of the way we affect and are affected by others. However, more often these connections become an after thought and we become fixated on our own convenience and success. If we choose to nurture our awareness of our connectedness, we can use our connections and the ripple effects of our actions to create a better world. When we begin to seek support from others, our connections can provide an opportunity for growth. In the end, tolerance, empathy and community trump anger, envy and self-absorption.
