Clairobscur Dance Presents SUPREMACY RIDE at the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center

With extraordinary dancers and eloquent Supremacy Ride. This performance features Laurie Sefton's choreography with two world premieres and her sensual 2017 work Girl, Get Off.

Known for dense and detailed movements, Laurie Sefton's award winning choreography is personal, emotional, and issue-based. It focuses on conveying complex ideas such as humanity, bullying, identity, climate change, memory loss, power, and sexuality. Dance has the power to be an action of change. It acts as a lens, magnifying concepts through abstraction and physicality, translating intangible ideas into movement. Choreography decodes emotional content and viscerally affects those who experience it. Ms. Sefton collaborates with researchers, composers, designers, poets and conceptual artists to investigate topics and develop a cohesive intention. For Supremacy Ride Ms. Sefton tackles issues sexual identity, societal stress brought about by the 2016 elections and collaborates with Hip Hop poet/spoken word artist Jason Chu.

The world premiere of Supremacy Ride (the evening's title work) was inspired by the 2016 election, rhetoric and gestures of the 45th president of the United States, this work was created to reflecting not only the physical gestures of this president, but how the crushing invasion of politics in the media has put me on an unintended trek of daily frustration, fear, anger and hope. Ms. Sefton began this work with gestures and then considered those from world leaders/past and present to create a visceral tirade full of meaning an innuendo. This work delves into the physicality and possible meaning of these gestures, expanded, contracted, how they make the mover, and recipient of the movements feel and respond. More than that, the work examines the struggle of coping with the new normal of daily upheaval and fear, and the journey of coping together.

Laurie Sefton's work with Hip Hop poet/spoken word artist Jason Chu began in 2016 with dances set to Jason's previously composed works freedom and The New Word for Immigrant. These works formed foundation for their deeper collaboration, shortly after the 2016 presidential election and manifested as three works in a collected entitled Triptych: Experience in Defiance in which Jason takes a personal tone echoing his thoughts about freedom, immigration and humanity's struggle to stay engaged. Crafted as solo, duet and trio and accompanied by Jason live on stage, Ms. Sefton brings her gifts of detail and emotion to his intelligent poetry.

The third and final work of the evening Girl, Get Off, is a work for six dancers with an original sound scape created by Bryan Curt Kostors. Inspired by a dream and informed by societal shifts towards new and expanding gender/orientation identifiers, Girl, Get Off is filled with sexual fluidity from a woman's point of view. This intensely sensual work is imbued with intricate details and dense movement that explores the idea that love is love, and that the freedom to experience joy and mutually consensual pleasure is a birthright and independent of gender identity.

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