New Moves Choreography Showcase

Wednesday, November 28, 2012, 4:00 pm to Friday, November 30, 2012, 4:00 pm

Buy Tickets

The New Moves Choreography Showcase presents advanced students’ contemporary choreography. With an inventive array of movement ideas, choreographers include Qinmin Liu, Jana Griffin, Stephen Fambro, Ayana Yonesaka, Marissa Brooks, Adriann Ramirez, Ari Pulido and Vincent Perez. Directed by Susan Whipp. $8-$15.
Location: 
Creative Arts Building, McKenna Theatre
Directions: 

View on Google Maps

Sponsor: 
School of Music and Dance
Contact: 
SF State Box Office
E-mail: 
Phone: 
415-338-2467
Event extras: 

Purchase tickets in advance for the best prices.

Program

  • Vincent Joseph Perez and dancers: Roots and Derivatives
  • Jana Griffin: A Constant Critique
  • Stephen Fambro: Fork in the Road
  • Ayana Yonesaka and dancers: 集い (Tsudoi) (The Gathering)
  • Intermission
  • Ari Pulido: Vines of Eternal Rest
  • Adriann Ramirez and dancers: Summertime Noir
  • Marissa Brooks: Sideshow Attraction
  • Qinmin Liu: 季 ji（Season)

    • Director’s notes

    Follow the spark

    Shortly before her death in 1958, modern dance pioneer Doris Humphrey wrote The Art of Making Dances. Informed by a lifetime of making and staging dances, Humphrey left to the dance world a set of instructions that would challenge future generations of choreographers to follow her lead in taking risks, making inquiries and contemplating the substance of ideas as a process of making new dances.

    In her book, Humphrey discussed choreographic concepts of craft and content, stage design and spacing, oppositional phrasing and musicality. She spoke to the motivations and mysteries surrounding the creative act. She described the choreographer’s development of the importance of an overarching theme as if it were equal to the spark that ignites an intimate relationship between lovers, a relationship that is intuitive, sensitive and exhaustive.

    While the creative process would take many twists and turns since Humphrey’s day, and postmodernism would undo many of the principles of form, content and technique informing modern dance, the essential observations about choreography that Humphrey set in words remain relevant today.

    Her ideas can be seen in the 2012 New Moves Choreography Showcase. Whether the dances draw on traditional forms, tell a story, offer abstract impressions of feelings or are studies in form, each dance is infused with the sparks of love and craft.

    Inspired by the process of recovery from the tsunami in northeast Japan, Ayana Yonesaka’s seemingly abstract Tsudoi explores notions of community and the effort of gathering support to find collective solutions to destruction. In contrast to Yonesaka’s inquiry, Adriann Ramirez’s Summertime Noir is inspired by nocturnal self-reflections and the real or imagined invitations for the viewer to join in those personal moments. Marissa Brooks takes the audience on a whimsical adventure in Sideshow Attraction, where Muscle Man tries desperately to seduce his fellow performers: the Bearded Lacy, the Dolls and the Clown.

    Other choreographers—Jana Griffin, Vincent Perez, Stephen Fambro, Ariana Pulido and Qinmin Liu—bring to the showcase their visions of movement and together they are all part of the next generation of choreographers making new art.

    Humphrey would be pleased with the choreographic explorations in this show.

    —Susan Whipp, Professor of Dance