USF Fall Dance Concert: Into the Unknown
What does it mean to feel? To stand on the precipice? To be alone or in a group? To give trust or to lose it? Join USF Faculty choreographers, Andrew Carroll, Michael Foley, Bliss Kohlmyer, and Sadie Lehmker, and world-renowned guest artist Jennifer Archibald, the Holloway Endowment Dance Artist in Residence, as we explore urgent issues of what it is to be human in this moment through dance and how we find bravery, empathy, trust, and a voice by moving beyond what we already know.
Groundbreaking choreographer Jennifer Archibald, our Holloway Endowed Dance Artist in Residence, has created a new piece for USF dancers. The piece brings to life the experience of being a migrant after mass destruction and trying to find a new life and a way to rebuild. Dancer Sloan Logsdon (Kansas City, KS) describes this as a unique highlight in her USF Dance experience, “The physicality of her movement paired with the mental awareness needed for her work pushed me to find a new depth within my own approach to dance” and Shelby Russ (Tampa, FL) says “Her process is exhilarating in a sense that your mind and body are put to the test as to what truly is the limit.”
Archibald is known worldwide for her choreographic innovations pushing dance forward, bringing her expertise in a variety of dance styles to innovate what ballet and other traditional forms can do. She is a graduate of The Alvin Ailey School and the Maggie Flanigan Acting Conservatory where she studied the Meisner Technique. She developed the Hip Hop dance curriculum at Columbia/Barnard College. Archibald has choreographed for the Atlanta Ballet, Ailey II, Cincinnati Ballet, Ballet Memphis, Kansas City Ballet, Tulsa Ballet, Ballet Nashville, Grand Rapids Ballet, and worked commercially for Tommy Hilfiger, NIKE and MAC Cosmetics as well as chart-listed singers and actors. She was recently appointed the first female Resident Choreographer in Cincinnati Ballet’s 40-year history.
Also in the Concert are pieces that demonstrate the breadth of talent at USF both in our faculty and our students. Andrew Carroll’s work, Trust and Treachery, explores the idea of trust through the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Sadie Lehmker’s work minutiae metanoia examines the interconnections between interpersonal perspectives and an ensemble. Bliss Kohlmeyer’s work Precipice asks “rather than fearing the precipice, what would happen if we venture willing into the unknown?” and Michael Foley’s work starts with the idea that if all living things can feel, and how can we extend empathy farther afoot?
The last few years have been a time of global uncertainty unlike any of us have experienced in our own lifetimes. USF Dance argues, both with this concert and the top ten Dance program that produced it, that the response is to push forward rather than to retreat, and to find the ways new ideas in Dance can help us meet the moment bravely dancing into the unknown.
October 27th-29th at 7:30pm and October 30th at 3pm in Theatre 1*
Please visit https://www.ticketmaster.com/ to obtain your tickets online and download them to your smartphone or device before arriving.