A May Day delight: 2010 Spring Dance Concert

The Dance Theater's stage lights had barely cooled after the highly successful Senior Capstone Dance concerts in early April when Skidmore's Dance Department got ready to heat things up again, with two Spring Dance Concerts to be performed at 2 and 8 p.m. on Saturday, May 1. Tickets are $10 for general admission and $5 for students and senior citizens. Tickets will be sold 45 minutes prior to each performance; advance reservations are not accepted.

While the capstone concerts celebrated the original choreography and solo dance skills of dancers graduating in the class of 2010, the Spring Dance Concert will showcase choreography and staging created by members of the Skidmore dance faculty and guest artists.

This year's presentation will feature dozens of Skidmore dance students from all class years performing works of ballet and contemporary dance presented by dance faculty members and choreographers Debra Fernandez, Mary Harney, Denise Warner Limoli, and Ruben Graciani. The program will also include Primate, a work for five dancers by guest choreographer Robert Battle, whose Battleworks Dance company has enjoyed several Skidmore residencies. Set to music by Philip Hamilton, the three-movement Primate takes off from Indonesian monkey chants - Balinese music dramas that feature chanting, ritualized movement, and rhythmic arm-waving - updating them into what one dance critic called "a triptych of tribal ritual."

Fernandez's new 2010 piece, Zero Point Zero, was first performed by 13 Skidmore student dancers in March at the Newark Museum in New Jersey, as a performing-art complement to the museum's exhibition Blackout.The dancers' moves were created to reflect - and seemingly activate - thebrilliantly colored geometric shapes and sensuous squiggles of artworks by internationally acclaimed artist Paul Henry Ramirez. Performed to original music by So Takahashi and Skidmore composer/accompanist Carl Landa, Zero Point Zero is Fernandez's second "dialogue in dance" with Ramirez; their first was the playful Balls, a dance that took place in and around the atrium and entrances of the Tang Museum during his 2002 exhibition, Elevatious Transcendsualistic.

Also on the program is the wedding scene from the classical ballet La Bayad re, premiered in 1877 by the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg. One synopsis describes the ballet as "a story of eternal love, mystery, fate, vengeance, and justice," set in "the Royal India of the past." Nikiya, a bayadere (temple dancer), is beloved by Solor, a noble warrior, but loses him when he is obliged to marry Gamzatti, the Rajah's daughter. Limoli staged and directed the wedding scene, which features a dramatic pas de deux and virtuoso solos for the principals. The Skidmore production features two casts of Gamzatti and Solor and a corps of 10 dancers.

Harney's new work, Spiral Staircase, is a contemporary-dance exploration of the complex and subtle inner workings of some forms of psychological and physical impairment. Staircase is set to original music by Skidmore composer Landa; Landa's work will be featured again in Graciani's two dance works.The very short Amuse Bouche will open the concert; a dance "appetizer" set to Joan Tower'sFanfare for the Uncommon Woman,Amuse Boucheis "a fun study on the strong feminine archetype," says Graciani.

The Spring Dance Concerts of 2010 will close with From Where I Sit, Graciani's large work for 16 dancers, which he describes as "a non-linear, non-narrative work with a series of visual images, vignettes, and cascades of movement," designed to explore how different perspectives create different interpretations.

For more information, call the Dance Theater Box Office at 518-580-5392.