Performing Dance Company

Joyous Celebration, Sordid Details, Emotionally Charged;

You know… Modern Dance

Performing Dance Company takes the stage at the Marriott Center for Dance with its Spring Concert February 9-11 & 16-18.  The concert features 5 very distinctive works and promises something for everyone. 

Bill Evans returns to the University of Utah to restage one of his most celebrated dances, For Betty.  When Mr. Evans originally began choreographing the work for Repertory Dance Theatre in 1970, his process was guided by Dr. Elizabeth Hayes’ desire to see something “joyous and exuberant.” Bill Evans had just finished his Graduate studies at the University of Utah, where Betty Hayes, who founded the Modern Dance program at the “U,” was one of his faculty mentors. The result was a beautiful dance that has been performed around the world, first by RDT and then by the Bill Evans Dance Company.  PDC is delighted to be able to perform this wonderful dance as a tribute to Dr. Elizabeth Hayes and her pioneering work for dance in the state of Utah.

The program will also feature four premieres from University of Utah faculty members, Pamela Geber, Eric Handman, Kaye Richards and Stephen Koester. 

Pamela Geber’s new work Mute Ears, Deaf Voices, is a haunting evocation of another time and place.  Half dressed and half undressed in 17th century undergarments, the eight dancers in the work, deliver a world of tightly wound, yet emotionally charged confessions.  Set to an Aria from Bach's Kantate "Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut" ("My Heart is swimming in Blood"), the piece suggests sordid details of each dancer’s past.   

Eric Handman describes his dance, The Sand Castle, as "volcanic in its intensity.”  Mr. Handman used the volatile dynamics of a community being ripped apart - while trying desperately to hold itself together, as inspiration for the movement. Passions and punishments engulf the dancers as they hurtle to the ground and fly into each other's arms. The dancers’ wrenching physicality compels us to watch this struggling community, no matter what.

The mysterious world of the night becomes vividly embodied in Stephen Koester’s new work. Quiet, stillness, and darkness obscure a nocturnal world of sensuality, violence, and unique social order.  A complex environment reveals itself to be observed, filled with the earthly sensations of sound and images of death, birth, sex and the feral.

Kaye Richards presents a ‘cultural collaboration’ in two solos for the concert.  The solos reflect Ms. Richards’ Afro-Caribbean heritage infused by the African-American and Native American heritage of her dancers.  She began choreographing a single solo to be performed by two different dancers, but as she worked more closely with the dancers, their individual personalities and distinctive movement styles led Ms. Richards to choreograph two separate dances.  In continuing with the culturally collaborative nature of the dances, one soloist performs to music performed by the South African Alexandra Youth Choir, with the other soloist performs performed to the poetry of Mari Evans’, I am a Black Woman.

Performing Dance Company will perform February 9-11 & 16-18 at the Marriott Center for Dance on the University of Utah campus. Curtain each evening is at 7:30 PM.  Tickets are $7 for students, U of U Faculty/Staff, and seniors, and $10 for General admission and may be purchased at the door, Kingsbury Hall box office, the student union information desk, or by phone at 581-7100.  For more information call 581-7327 or visit us on the web at www.dance.utah.edu.