PERFORMANCE DATES:
MARCH 8 & 9 8pm
Grant Jacoby & Dancers
Althea Dance Company
Photo credit: The Fleet
Grant Jacoby & Dancers
The impetus for softshell was built out of the acknowledgment, and acceptance, of the aging dancing body. In particular, navigating a “post”-pandemic world has created a strange space where deferred dreaming permeates beneath a simmering surface. softshell takes that notion and filters it through the lens of embodied trauma. Sliding the liminal space between joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, the work is a quiet, queer experiment that seeks no solution. Dancers cohabitate a universal, yet individualized landscape of symbiotically shared movement language where by design, no intentional crescendos can be found. Instead, softshell asks the viewer to slow down alongside it, embracing its current stasis of intimacy, and preparing for the inevitable mess that has yet to materialize.
softshell is performed by Tori Breen, Grant Jacoby, Sarah Liebau, Arielle Ridley, and Anne Tantuico. Music is by Michael Wall. The work was made possible thanks to support from the Monira Foundation, Dance Local, Center for Dance Arts, and Morven Museum & Garden.
Photo credit: Whitney Browne
Althea Dance Company
Lazar is a duet choreographed by Thea Bautista based on an extract from a novel written by the French author Olivier Benyahya. While the music was composed using the text, the movement is inspired by the words and plays with the musicality and the rhythm the text creates. The novel becomes a visual and sound experience in which words translate into movements.
The work was partly created in 2017 and 2019 during two residencies in Oaxaca and was composed of dance and literature.
Thanks to the support of the cultural center “Antigua Estación del Ferrocarril” in Oaxaca, Mexico, the piece turned into a 40 min piece that was premiered in Oaxaca on the 17th of March 2019.