Where Edges Blur: an MFA Thesis Concert
Where Edges Blur is a multidisciplinary thesis concert that invites audiences into a richly immersive experience where the boundaries between movement forms, film, theatre, and sound dissolve and reconfigure. This evening is a presentation of choreographic works by Kara Robertson, Ruger Memmott, Soph Cardinal, and Alexia Maikidou Poutrino. Developed through rigorous research and artistic risk-taking, Where Edges Blur brings you into worlds where what defines dance is questioned, expanded, and reimagined.
Intertwining ballet and contemporary dance, Kara Robertson’s work, Even This Was Written invites audiences into a world suspended between chaos and calm. Eight dancers move through layered spaces of time and being where their bodies are woven with lush and atmospheric visual projections. Each chapter unfolds as a meditation on the war and peace that lives within and amongst us where life continues to endure.
where we were | have been | will be is an interdisciplinary work directed by Soph Cardinal (they/them) in collaboration with their performers. Shifting boundaries of movement, film, sound score, and visual art, this piece invites the audience to reconcile their relationships to transformation, grief, and discomfort, to sit in the spaces in-between.
Hybrid House is the result of an investigation into Ruger Memmott’s personal creative process. As a dancer and choreographer that feels at home in multiple dance genres, he sought to better understand himself as an artist by embracing his instinctual draw to hybridize dance styles. By doing so, he learned much about dance as a mixing pot of influence and style. This series of epiphanies and contemplative reorganizations of space touches on themes of discovery, inspiration, iteration, and trusting your gut. As the dancers experiment, explore, and rearrange they get closer and closer to building something that feels like home.
(a)similar is a work that brings the arts of dance and theater into a dialogue through the embodiment of language and sound. Under the direction of Alexia Maikidou Poutrino, the dancers translate words into movement, allowing meaning to dissolve into a cluster of mixed languages and syllables. What remains is the rhythm of speech, the texture of sound, and the physical traces of communication in motion.
October 30th at 5:30pm
October 31st at 7:30pm
November 1st at 7:30pm.
(All times listed are MST.)
Marriott Center for Dance, Hayes Christensen Theater
330 South 1500 East, Salt Lake City, UT 84112
Free admission, but seating is limited.
Live-streaming available at https://www.dance.utah.edu/performances-events