Carleton Dance Faculty, Judith Howard, Jane Shockley, Whitney McClusky and senior students, Mike Bahn, Ellis Johnston and Lucia Webb will present an evening of dance work in the Weitz Center Theater and Atrium on Friday, May 20 at 7:30pm and Sunday, May 22 at 2pm.
Audience members are encouraged to come earlier to experience the rich mixture of artistic disciplines that prelude the show. The Weitz atrium will house installation work by Carleton art professors Kelly Connole, Stephen Mohring and Danny Saathoff, and a performance by all-male acapella group the Carleton Knights.
FIELD, a show filled with beautiful images, wit, fine dancing, and evocative ideas, is a movement piece that responds to the time-sensitive dilemmas of global climate and agriculture based changes. In an ambiguous narrative with a strong foundation of geopolitical commentary, the gestures within the dance piece ritualizes an unresolvable end and the moment that precedes passionate action. Ideas of soil, seeds, parched land, non-continuance, erasure, and the “Dark Mountain Manifesto” fuel the piece.
Jane Shockley will premiere a company piece with lush group momentum, sensitive contact and an intriguing soundtrack. Whitney McClusky will premiere an energetic, mischievous, and elegant work for five dancers. And thought-provoking, original work by three senior dance students, Mike Bahn, Ellis Johnston and Lucia Webb, will round out this evening.
Some of the work in FIELD will be experimental and enigmatic and some will be more familiar to audiences. In Howard’s words, “Contemporary dance searches to explore concepts, ideas, the body, or the art form itself and does not always try to be entertaining although that is certainly a byproduct… rather, it seeks to bring the audience into a way of thinking and moving that challenges preconceptions. Whatever the concept or intention in a dance piece, the audience is important and necessary for the dance to be complete.”