Urbana, Ill. (February 23, 2021) – Dance at Illinois will present March Dance 2021, dedicated to the work of our third-year MFA candidates in Dance on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday March 18-21 at 7 & 9pm CT at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, 500 South Goodwin Ave., Urbana. The event will be streaming LIVE online and performed live for a small audience of students, staff, and faculty as part of the Dance at Illinois curriculum following university-approved COVID-19 safety guidelines. Each night will feature a different choreographer, with a post-show talk back. Streaming information for each show can be found at krannertcenter.com. The events are free. Donations are strongly encouraged.
Thursday, March 18th will feature work by Danzel Thompson-Stout entitled The Undying and Resilient, a dance film and choreographic stage work aiming to enliven the habitual and cultural inhabitance of the Black identifying dancing body. Highlighting archived memories and patterns, the movers are equipped to access their pasts in order to make sense of their present and ultimately reimagine future worlds—whether underground or seen—that are distinct to their wants and desires.
Canadian Haitian choreographer Roxane D’Orleans Juste, uses her passion for choreography to create vivid living statements of human experience. On Friday, March 19th, her new work,Délivrance draws its roots from the fertile ground of our natural connectedness to birthland. It holds within it the strident sounds of nature and the murmurs of silenced voices. This dance speaks of loss and bold courage, of passion and abandon. It speaks of the resilience of the displaced and the disenfranchised.
Saturday March 20th will feature Rachel Rizzuto’s I’m Ally, reexamining the late ’90s television show Ally McBeal from a critical, feminist lens. Rizzuto engages a fragmented, pop culture-infused aesthetic to unpack complex narrative theories against Ally McBeal’s first season. She shapes a world that adheres to the show’s quirky law firm premise even as it inevitably hurtles toward a garish and surreal theatrical rendering. Original songs, distorted dialogue, and grotesque and aggressive expressions of femininity coexist in a dense and warped cacophony onstage.
Finally, on Sunday March 21st, Jaylen De’Angelo Clay’s Trapped Souls – An Explication of Black Lifeis a (two-part) multidisciplinary film – with an inserted solo, that examines the immediacy of liberation for the young Black millennial surviving in the 21st century. This venture aims to promote healing and liberation through dance for the Black body incorporating poetics, visual imagery, gestural, and movement scores utilizing The Africanist aesthetic and past histories of protests in American culture.
Please contact Anna Sapozhnikov sapozhni@illinois.edu with any questions.
