Limón Company to end residency with Jan. 28 performance

The Limon Dance Company returned to Saratoga Springs in early January as guest artists at Skidmore College, where the 14 dancers' three-week residency will culminate in a performance at 8 p.m. Friday, Jan. 28, in the Arthur Zankel Music Center, Helen Filene Ladd Concert Hall. 

Presented by Skidmore's Dance Department and the Office of the Dean of Special Programs, the program is titled "Masters and the Next Generation," and will feature "Chrysalis," a new commission by company member and choreographer Jonathan Fredrickson. Also on the program are a revival ofJiři Kylian's 1975 work, "La Cathedrale Engloutie," and Jos Limon's "There is a Time," a 1956 work by the company's late founder, which was also danced by the company in 2010 on the stage at Saratoga Performing Arts Center.

General admission to the Skidmore performance will be $15, or $7 for students. Tickets are available online at http://www.skidmore.showclix.com/.

With a score by Spanish composer Marcos Galvany, Fredrickson's "Chrysalis" had its premiere in December at the Jerome Robbins Theater in New York City, and is offered at Skidmore through a long-term residency grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. Inspired by the powerful Oracle of Delphi, the work features five women dancers.

"Chrysalis" was developed as a companion work to Limon's "Emperor Jones," which will be restaged during this residency by former Limon Company principal dancer and former Assistant Artistic Director Clay Taliaferro, who learned the work directly from Limon. The free, public lecture-demonstration of Taliaferro's reconstruction of "Emperor Jones" will take place at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 25, in the Skidmore Dance Theater.

The Limon Dance Company has a long and important history with Skidmore, having danced and taught three summer residencies and one other residency during the academic semester at the college. Associate Professor Mary DiSanto-Rose of the college's dance department faculty first brought the company to the campus in 1984 and is pleased to be coordinating this residency.