Dance Company To Perform 'At Home,' In Houston

The SHSU Dance Company will be “at home and on tour” during its two-week spring concert beginning Thursday through Saturday (April 19-21) and April 26-28.

The concert will feature both faculty works and the faculty and student choreography recently recognized at the American College Dance Festival.

The first week’s performance will be held at 8 p.m. nightly in Academic Building III’s Dance Theater, and the second week’s performance will also be held at 8 p.m. nightly, but in downtown Houston at the Barnevelder Movement Arts Complex.

The concert features a variety of choreography, including guest choreographer and visiting lecturer Jean Denney Grotewohl’s “Footnotes,” a lively combination of American roots and traditional music teamed with contemporary and traditional step dance, clogging, hoofing, tap, and period social dance.

Denney's work experiments with ethnosomatic historiography, or how the memory of a dance form's past comes alive when danced by current dancers, who in turn make their own footnotes in the tradition's history.

Jonathan Charles will present two works in the concert: “At Midnight,” the “beautifully balletic work” featured in the gala concert at the Southeast Regional American College Dance Festival, and an upbeat jazz dance to "Sing Sing Sing" by Benny Goodman, according to Melissa Wynn, assistant professor of dance.

“Blue’s Gone,” by Cindy Gratz, reflects her experience of being in a car accident that left her with a broken neck and injured spinal cord.

“In some ways it’s a tribute to my truck, ‘Blue,’ who really saved my life,” Gratz said. “I think it allows viewers to identify with the shame, fear, and sadness that I felt. And there was this choice I had to make – to live with the excruciating pain or escape, … you know, fly away.” It is danced through the eyes of angels.

Kista Tucker will present “Simple Stick People,” an “eerie, yet delightful work that is liberating through its finding of beauty within simplicity.”

Wynn’s “Wanderlust” is a purely kinetic contemporary dance piece to the music of Radiohead's Thom Yorke.

Finally, Maggie Lasher's “Animal Heaven” and Taylor Green's “Fit In” are the two student-choreographed works on the concert, both receiving accolades at the recent American College Dance Festival.

Tickets for the home performances are $8 for general admission and $5 students and senior citizens. Tickets for the Houston performances are $15 for general admission and $15 students and senior citizens.

Audience reservations can be made by calling the dance box office at 936.294.3988, and directions to Barnevelder can be found online at www.shsu.edu/dance.

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SHSU Media Contact: Jennifer Gauntt
April 13, 2007
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