Events > Health, Physical Education & Dance

Student Dance Concert
Friday, May 11, 2012
21m:19s | 265 views

Queensborough Community College’s Dance Program presents two evenings of dance! Thursday, May 10th features QCC dance students performing choreography by Keith A. Thompson, Robert Battle, and Emily Berry along with four promising student choreographers. Friday, May 11th features danceTactics Performance Group/Keith A. Thompson performing Keith Thompson’s latest work, “Beginnings Forever Lost” and the QCC dance students performing Keith Thompson’s “Big Love”.

Thursday, May 10th, the QCC dance students will perform at the Queensborough Performing Arts Center, featuring Keith Thompson’s “Big Love”, Robert Battle’s “Battlefield”, and Emily Berry’s “Fugue”. The concert will present a wide range of modern dance styles from influences from Trisha Brown to hot on the scene choreographer Robert Battle.

Jennifer Dunning of the New York Times said of Thompson’s “Big Love”, “Big Love,” danced to Etta James, Otis Redding, Mozart, Handel and Ernesto Lecuona, was a big, hilarious mess of a pajama party without a single wasted bit of silliness”. Thompson performed with Trisha Brown Dance Company for ten years, the last three of which he also served as rehearsal director. Keith continues to represent TBDC in the sharing of Technique and Repertory both at the Trisha Brown Studio in New York City as well as festivals, schools, and workshops around the world. He recently danced for Bessie Award Winning Choreographer Bebe Miller, and currently with the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange.

“Mr. Battle makes an audience sit up and take notice, marvel, even laugh. His work reaches over the edge of the stage and communicates with people” (Joy Goodwin, July 7th, the New York Sun, July 7th, 2006). Erika Pujic, former Battleworks Dance Company principle dancer and rehearsal director, has been on faculty at QCC for the past three years and has set Battle’s “Battlefield” with a section from “The Hunt”, the acclaimed piece Battle has set on the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

“Fugue” is a new work by choreographer Emily Berry, assistant professor of dance at QCC, director of the dance program, and artistic director of B3W. "Fugue" was inspired by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, Quiera Hudes’s play Elliot: A Soldier’s Fugue. The piece was first performed in December to open for Quiera Hudes giving a talk at City Tech College. Like Hudes’s plays, Berry’s choreography addresses real life issues. Eva Yaa Asantewaa said of Berry’s choreography, "Skin boasted intelligent and strong performances by these women–one white, one black–who literally grappled with each other while confronting urgent questions of racial identity and common humanity". (©2006, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Sept. 2006 http://home.mindspring.com/~magickal1/)

Friday, May 11th will feature Keith Thompson’s Beginnings Forever Lost. Beginnings Forever Lost for five dancers, explores the cross-correlations that may occur randomly or unconsciously between the dancers. It explores the origins and intersections of the human condition between the ensemble based on ideas and stories surrounding migration and emigration. In essence what it means to leave or go toward something, somewhere or someone? It is an abstract investigation of movements finding relations that are common and uncommon.

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