INSIDE DANCE Bates Dance Festival INSIDE DANCE

Legendary choreographer, Rennie Harris has restaged his classic work, ‘Rome & Jewels' to honour the company's anniversary. 25 years later this critically acclaimed Elizabethan masterpiece, Rome & Jewels is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet set in the streets of Philadelphia.

Bebe Miller was in attendance as a guest teacher with her long time collaborator Angie Hauser .
In this episode you will hear an interview with Bebe Miller that was conducted in 2013 while she was here at the festival restaging her piece The Hendrix Project with the students as well as presenting her work A History.

This episode features dance and music collaborators who without each other their piece would not exist.
We will begin with the piece, Two, with dancer, Shura Baryshnikov and cellist Adrienne Taylor, long term collaborators, that have drawn upon their creative history together to build a process focused on deep listening, observation, and response.
Next we have the work: IzumonookunI is a dance inspired by Izumo no Okuni, founder of the Japanese dance-drama form, Kabuki—a form that currently contains little trace of its female-centric, grassroots origins. Choreographer Aretha Aoki and sound and visual designer Ryan MacDonald re-imagine Okuni as a punk rock/sci-fi figure in a landscape of built objects, digital design and live synthesizer. The piece touches on the tensions between erasure and hyper visibility and is an ode to the women in Aoki’s ancestry of whom little is known.
Next we have the work: IzumonookunI is a dance inspired by Izumo no Okuni, founder of the Japanese dance-drama form, Kabuki—a form that currently contains little trace of its female-centric, grassroots origins. Choreographer Aretha Aoki and sound and visual designer Ryan MacDonald re-imagine Okuni as a punk rock/sci-fi figure in a landscape of built objects, digital design and live synthesizer. The piece touches on the tensions between erasure and hyper visibility and is an ode to the women in Aoki’s ancestry of whom little is known.

This episode features Joanna Kotze a Brooklyn-based, Bessie-award winning dancer, choreographer and teacher. She creates highly physical dance performances through a collaborative, multi-disciplinary process, presenting ways to look at effort, labor, humor, violence, unpredictability, and beauty through movement as well as the body’s relationship to sound, materials, light, and space.

Onye Ozuzu is back this season sharing her ideas and beginnings of her new work - Space Carcasses. Space Carcasses is an interdisciplinary performance that juxtaposes, superimposes, and asserts the body’s relationship to its built environment, particularly spaces that echo with Afrodiasporic forced migrations

For this episode we will share excerpts from the artist's talks with David Dorfman and Stephan Batten Bland.
David Dorfman and his collaborators were scheduled to present their work, (A)way out of my body, in 2020. Due to the pandemic now Two years later they were able to bring this work to the festival.
(A)Way Out of My Body uses “out of body” experience as a metaphor for our times and our body politic. DDD’s bodies propel themselves through space and time, attempting to pass the barrier of reality and plight into the realm of positivity and growth.

Stephanie Batten Bland brought her Company SBB with the work: Embarqued: Stories of Soil. Originally this performance was scheduled to be shown outside but due to the high temperatures the show was moved into the Bates College Schaeffer theater.

Embarqued: Stories of Soil is a dance-theatre work centered around a transformative shipmast inviting ˈmīɡrəˌtôrē/ reflections, revealing post-colonial foundations and mythology. Through questioning existing relationships to memorials - they call up all who made our united history, enabling audiences to viscerally and holistically connect our country both forwards and backwards in space and time.