News and Events
This spring the Department of Dance presents the Buglisi Dance Theatre, March 23; The Creative Process with PearsonWidrig and Vassar dancers, April 20; and VaBang!, May 6, 2009.
POUGHKEEPSIE, NY—The Department of Dance at Vassar College will present three programs this spring in The Frances Daly Fergusson Dance Theater in Kenyon Hall at 8pm. Special guest artists will include Buglisi Dance Theatre (3/23), Sara Pearson and Patrik Widrig directing Vassar dancers (4/20), and VaBang! (5/6). All programs are free and open to the public, with seating on a first-come, first-serve basis. For additional information, call the Dance Office at (845) 437-7470.
BUGLISI DANCE THEATRE
“A feast of the eyes and soul transcending, rarefied beauty” (Arts Houston) is just one of the many rapturous statements describing the Buglisi Dance Theatre (BDT), who will give a public performance on Monday, March 23. The company, known for technical excellence and unparalleled dramatic power, will perform three works: Threshold, Interplay, and Requiem.
BDT has performed nationally and internationally at venues including at Jacob’s Pillow, Joyce Theater, Kennedy Center, Milan’s Teatro Nuovo, St. Germain en Laye (Paris), and in Montreal, Bombay, and Edinburgh; and at festivals including the Vail International Dance Festival, Melbourne (Australia) International Festival, Chautauqua Festival, Interlochen Arts Festival, Italy’s San Marino Stage Festival, and International Dance Week in Prague.
The Company, directed by Jacqulyn Buglisi, draws from both distinguished performers and passionate young artists. Margo Jefferson, noted in the New York Times, that the company “renews the Graham technique in all its full-bodied glory . . . Everything is here: those potent torsos, contracting, releasing, spiraling; legs, arms and heads alert to every surge of emotion. They have inherited her theatrical mastery of lighting, costumes and stage space, her way of making us feel that each dance is an encounter with destiny” (www.buglisi-foreman.org).
THE CREATIVE PROCESS IN DANCE COMPOSITION, A SHOWING BY VASSAR DANCERS
On Monday, April 20, Sara Pearson and Patrik Widrig, of PEARSONWIDRIG DANCETHEATER, will conduct “The Creative Process in Dance Composition, a Showing by Vassar Dancers.” Working with Vassar dance students, Pearson and Widrig will elucidate the process of their unique choreography and creative inspiration.
PEARSONWIDRIG DANCETHEATER has gained an international following for their choreographic work is considered: “American dance theater at its funniest and most compelling” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Switzerland). PearsonWidrig’s choreographic sensibility extends far beyond the body, with use of oranges, blocks of ice, and other props in order to convey socio-political, poetic, mystical, historical, and humorous ideas. In site-specific and community dance/theater/video installations, they challenge habitual assumptions of what art is, where art happens, and who may participate.
PearsonWidrig’s projects have taken them from rowboats in Central Park to the Great Lawn at Jacob’s Pillow, from the Eiun-In Buddhist temple in Kyoto to the modern architecture of I. M. Pei’s Portland Museum of Art (www.pearsonwidrig.org).
VABANG!
VaBang! will make its Vassar debut on Wednesday, May 6. Known for creating intensely athletic, socially-conscious works, the company’s mission is to bring together unique styles of modern dance from the east and west coasts.
In 2007, Vassar alumnae from the class of 2005, Jessie Feller and Julia Sabangan, founded VaBang!, a bi-coastal modern dance company based in New York City and San Francisco. Their first full-length show premiered in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles to sold-out audiences. Feller is based in San Francisco while Sabangan is based in New York City.
Vabang! exists to transcend boundaries and conventional categories, to shape new concepts of “space” (social, conceptual, geographical), and to bridge various spaces, be they natural or socially constructed. Through intensely athletic movement, Vabang! seeks to provoke audiences to question their path dependent thinking on current social and geo-political issues such as feminism, trans-nationalism, and climate change (www.vabang.org).
DEPARTMENT OF DANCE
The Department of Dance offers a non-major, elective course of study at Vassar. The faculty consists of three full-time and two part-time teachers, and three adjunct artists who serve as accompanists and who compose, direct and sometimes perform with the student company, the Vassar Repertory Dance Theatre (dance.vassar.edu).
These performances are presented under the auspices of The Department of Dance, The Jeanne Periolat Czula Endowment, and The Jeanne Periolat Czula Fund, and made possible by Jeffrey Paley and Valerie Ritter Paley ’83, and an anonymous donor.
People with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact the Office of Campus Activities at (845) 437-5370. Directions to the Vassar Campus in the Town of Poughkeepsie are available at www.vassar.edu/directions.
Vassar College is a highly selective, coeducational, independent, residential liberal arts college founded in 1861.
Posted by College Relations Wednesday, December 31, 1969
About the Arts
Powerhouse Theater
The Powerhouse Theater is a collaboration between New York Stage and Film and Vassar College. It is dedicated to both emerging and established artists in the development and production of new works for theater and film. During an intense eight-week summer residency on the Vassar campus, up to twenty different projects are publicly presented, typically engaging more than 200 professional artists and theater students. Plays, musicals, and screenplays are presented in a variety of forms: readings, workshops, and fully staged productions. Since the first Powerhouse Theater season in 1985, New York Stage and Film and Vassar have served more than 2,000 artists and over 175,000 audience members through the development and production of artistically exceptional and affordably priced performances.
Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center
Located just inside Vassar's Main Gate, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center houses the college's permanent collection, over 18,000 works, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, and glass and ceramic wares, charting the history of art from antiquity to the present. The Permanent Collection Galleries feature 350 works, ranging from the sculpted Head of Viceroy Merymose from His Outer Sarcophagus (Egyptian, c 1375 BCE) in the Antiquities Gallery to Marsden Hartley's oil on canvas Indian Composition (1914-15) in the Twentieth Century Gallery. For information on current and upcoming special exhibitions, self-guided and curriculum-based tours, and group visits, please visit the website. The art center is open to the public, and admission is free.
James W. Palmer Gallery
Located in the College Center in Main Building, the James W. Palmer III '90 Gallery presents eight shows annually, including exhibitions by renowned artists and photographers, studio art faculty and students, and local arts organizations. Recent highlights included Andrea Baldeck’s black-and-white photo exhibit, Touching the Mekong: A Southeast Asian Sojourn, organized by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology; the Vassar Haiti Project’s annual exhibition and auction of imported arts and handcrafts; and Design Inside, showcasing the work of Vassar’s College Relations design team. All exhibitions are free and open to the public. For information on upcoming exhibitions, visit the website or call (845) 437-5370.
Music Department
Located in the Belle Skinner Hall of Music, the Martel Recital Hall is wonderfully suited, both acoustically and aesthetically, to music performance. With seating for 500, the Martel is home to the Vassar College Orchestra, Choir, Women's Chorus, Madrigal Singers, and numerous chamber groups and ensembles. The Martel concert schedule routinely includes distinguished guest artists, faculty recitals, senior recitals, and special musical events, such as last year's series of organ recitals celebrating the installation and dedication of the college's superb pipe organ, designed by masterbuilder Paul Fritts. For information on upcoming concerts and events (which are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted), please visit the website.
Dance Department
The Department of Dance sponsors several public performances each year. Among those, the Vassar Repertory Dance Theatre (VRDT) has a series of Works in Progress showings in the fall, a winter Modfest performance in conjunction with the The Department of Music, winter galas at the 1869 Bardavon Opera House, and two All Parents Weekend performances in the spring. The department's Master Class program annually invites at least one ballet and one modern expert to campus in addition to two people in other areas of dance. Public performances and lectures are often associated with these renowned visitors. Guest artists in the past have included: Irina Kolpokova, Arthur Mitchell, Helene Alexopoulos, Gregory Hines, Anna Kisselgoff, Donald Byrd, Edward Villella, Ronald K. Brown, Irene Dowd, Allegra Kent, Gelsey Kirkland, Pilobolus w/Adam Battlestein, Suzanne Farrell, Mummenschantz, Eldar Aliev, Deborah Jowitt, Bill T. Jones, Pascal Rioult, Clinton Luckett of ABT, Bill Irwin, and Donald McKayle. Many of the department's dance performances are in the Frances Daly Fergusson Dance Theater, located in Kenyon Hall.
Drama Department Experimental Theater
Presenting several public performances each semester in the Martel Theater of the Vogelstein Center for Drama and Film and the Hallie Flanagan Davis Powerhouse Theater, the Experimental Theater is a place to explore theories learned in the classroom and to experiment with theatrical forms. In the tradition of pioneering stage director Hallie Flanagan, students are encouraged to experience and experiment with all aspects of the theater. Flanagan, who accepted a position to teach drama at Vassar in 1925, founded the Experimental Theater following her visit to the theaters of Europe in 1926 on a Guggenheim Fellowship. (http://drama.vassar.edu).