Doppelganger Dance Collective And Ensemble Warhol Present JEANNE & ELIZABETH

Jeanne & Elizabeth, an evening of dance accompanied by live classical music. Presented by Doppelgänger Dance Collective and Ensemble Warhol in association with Fort Point Theatre Channel and Green Street Studios. Performances Friday & Saturday, August 31 & September 1, 8 pm. Green Street Studios, 185 Green Street, Cambridge. Tickets $25 ($20 students, seniors, and members of the Boston Dance Alliance). For more information: www.fortpointtheatrechannel.org/index/#/elizabeth-jeanne/, 617-840-6267, ensemblewarhol@gmail.com; for advance tickets: www.brownpapertickets.com/event/3416284.

Doppelgänger Dance Collective and Ensemble Warhol join forces with Fort Point Theatre Channel and Green Street Studios in presenting Jeanne & Elizabeth, an evening of dance accompanied by live classical music, performing compositions by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Mark Warhol.

Jeanne & Elizabeth consists of two independent works on the program. The first piece, Men and Their Machines, is an aria taken from the opera JEANNE, which is based on a libretto by James Swindell. The second piece, Elizabeth III, is choreographed by Doppelgänger Dance Collective's resident choreographer Heidi Henderson.

Brief synopses of each work follows, produced under the collective title Jeanne & Elizabeth. (For complete information, visit www.jeanneandelizabeth.com, with representative videos located at www.jeanneandelizabeth.com/jeanneandelizabethtrailer.):

Men and Their Machines

Men and Their Machines will feature choreography developed by dancers/choreographers Shura Baryshnikov and Danielle Davidson in collaboration with dramaturge Ilya Vidrin, with musical accompaniment composed by Warhol and performed by Ensemble Warhol, conducted by Andrew Altenbach. The Ensemble's performers are Rane Moore (clarinet), Aaron Rivkin (baritone horn), Robert Schulz (timpani), Matt Sharrock (rototoms), and Amanda Romano (harp), with soprano Anna Ward performing the title role of Jeanne.

Men and Their Machines expresses the duality of the character of Jeanne. On the outside, the aria tells the story of a mundane existence - coffee, work, conversations with a co-worker, thinking to oneself - but on the inside a fire smolders. While the soprano sings of timeless issues that women face, that internal fire is brought to the forefront as dancers spell out things the character Jeanne is repressing or unable to embody at important moments.

Men and Their Machines will be the third excerpt from the opera JEANNE that has been presented to the public.

Elizabeth III

Elizabeth III will feature choreographer Henderson performing with Baryshnikov and Davidson, accompanied by a string quartet led by Doppelgänger Dance Collective's musical director Adrienne Taylor, who invites the audience to discover a deconstruction of Mozart's String Quartet No. 4 in C Major, K. 157, performed by Emmalee Holmes-Hicks (violin), Ethan Wood (violin), Anna Griffis (viola), and Adrienne Taylor (cello).

Elizabeth III: The queens dream in white, of things that are light like feathers and marshmallows. They live in an oddly contained pseudo-Elizabethan world. They wear high collars and bloomers and dance big floppy dances holding onto their skirts. They are regal and romantic and hopelessly out of date.

Backgrounds on the principal creative team (with further information on all participants at www.jeanneandelizabeth.com):

Shura Baryshnikov is an interdisciplinary movement artist who works broadly as a dancer, actor, improviser, movement designer, and somatic movement educator. In addition to her work with Doppelgänger Dance Collective, Baryshnikov is also a founding member of the contact improvisation performance ensemble setGo and has designed movement for Trinity Repertory Company, The Wilbury Theatre Group, Bridge Repertory Theater, Elemental Theatre Collective and on many Brown/Trinity MFA productions. As a freelance dancer, Baryshnikov has performed with Lorraine Chapman the Company, Betsy Miller Dance Projects, ali kenner brodsky & co., Heidi Henderson, Lostwax Multimedia Dance, Dancing Legacy, and Festival Ballet Providence. She is Head of Physical Theatre for the Brown/Trinity Rep MFA Program, an Associate Professor of the Practice in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University.

Danielle Davidson is a performing artist, choreographer and educator based in New England. She has danced with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, Productions Fila 13, Opera Ontario and The Banff Festival, among others, and has performed as a soloist or generated lead roles in works by Thierry Malandain, George Balanchine, and Roland Petit, to name a few. As a choreographer, Davidson is regularly commissioned to create dances for college and university dance programs. Davidson is on faculty at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee and is in her fourth season with Prometheus Dance. In addition, Davidson is the co-artistic director/performer of Doppelgänger Dance Collective (DDC), a duets performance project which commissions new works each season by nationally renowned choreographers, engages live musicians, and performs internationally.

Heidi Henderson, choreographer for elephant JANE dance, a pick up company in RI, is a five time recipient of the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Choreography Fellowship. elephant JANE dance has performed at the South Bank Centre in London, in New York City, at Jacob's Pillow Inside/Out Festival, at The International Festival of Dance in Taegu, Korea, at the Bates Dance Festival, and around New England. Henderson has danced in the companies of Bebe Miller, Nina Wiener, Peter Schmitz, Sondra Loring, and Paula Josa-Jones. Henderson is a contributing editor at Contact Quarterly, a vehicle for moving ideas. She received her BA from Colby College and her MFA from Smith College and is an Associate Professor of dance at Connecticut College. Henderson has been teaching at the Bates Dance Festival for many years.

Ilya Vidrin began his early training at the Boston Ballet and went on to compete nationally and internationally in Latin Dancesport before arriving to a confluent practice of modern, contemporary, and improvisational movement and sound. In recent years, Ilya has performed as a guest artist with Urbanity, Lorraine Chapman The Company, Abraham.In.Motion, and Kurofune Ensemble (Japan). He has created multimedia works as the artistic director of the Reciprocity Collaborative, as well as through partnerships and creative residencies with the Interlochen Arts Academy, International Beethoven Festival, Boston Youth Moves, Museum of Fine Arts, Hakodate Performing Arts High School (Japan), The Cambrians, and the Doppelgänger Dance Collective. He is a Media and Visualization Fellow at Harvard's Bok Center for Learning and Teaching and a movement instructor in the Harvard Dance Proream.

Hailed for her "amazing vocal as well as emotional range," Anna Ward is a passionate and versatile vocalist. Ward has appeared recently with Juventas New Music Ensemble, ArtsEmerson, Gare St. Lazare Ireland, Marimba Cabaret, Boston Chamber Symphony, Raylynmor Opera, Lorelei Ensemble, Yale Choral Artists, and the Mark Morris Dance Company. Ward is an avid proponent of contemporary music. In addition to her ongoing work on JEANNE, Ms. Ward has originated six operatic roles in their respective world premières. Ward has also had the pleasure of performing many standard 20th-Century works for soprano, including Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915, and Cathy Berberian's Stripsody. Ward received her masters from the Boston Conservatory. She is an adjunct faculty member at Wellesley College and Middlesex Community College.

Maestro Andrew Altenbach brings an energetic ingenuity to his symphonic and operatic conducting that continues to garner him national attention as a musical leader of his generation. Critically acclaimed for his deep sense of musical style and nuance, with a repertoire ranging from Baroque to contemporary works, Maestro Altenbach has conducted for such companies as Minnesota Opera, Central City Opera, Opera Birmingham, Opera Africa, American Opera Projects, Milwaukee Opera Theater, and Opera on the James. Upcoming engagements include the Boston Conservatory Opera program in Valencia, Spain, and a return to the Lakes Area Music Festival. Altenbach is Music Director of Opera at the Boston Conservatory and Music Director of the Brookline Symphony Orchestra and Artistic Director of the Minnesota Bach Ensemble.

James Swindell was born in Alexandria, Alabama, and grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He worked throughout his life behind the scenes as lighting designer, sound designer, set designer, stage manager, and house manager at such theaters as Main Street Theater and Stages Theater in Houston, the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, and the Clarence Brown Theatre at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Besides Sunday with Joy, a one-act play produced by Fort Point Theatre Channel (FPTC) in 2010, he wrote poems and full-length plays. He also wrote two opera librettos for composer Mark Warhol, FPTC's co-founder and the artistic director of Ensemble Warhol. Swindell died of lung cancer in 2006.

Doppelgänger Dance Collective (DDC) is a dancer-directed repertory company focused on the creation and performance of original, contemporary choreographic work. Founded in 2015 by co-directors Shura Baryshnikov and Danielle Davidson, DDC offers choreographic commissions to a diverse group of artists each season, asking for reconsideration of the traditional choreographer/dancer hierarchy as well as who controls the means of production. DDC is committed to interdisciplinary collaborations with a wide range of artists including musicians, composers, theatre artists, film makers, and designers. Doppelgänger Dance Collective has received two NEFA grants, six Rhode Island State Council on the Arts grants, and three Creative Arts Council grants. DDC has performed in Providence (RI), Boston, Natick and Cambridge, Canterbury and Keene (NH), Seattle (WA), New York City, and in London, UK.
www.doppelgangerdancecollective.com

Ensemble Warhol (EW) was formed in 1999 by Mark Warhol and who continues to serve as its artistic director, a music group that specializes in the performance of contemporary music. EW has appeared as part of the Elizabeth Willet Musser New Music Series and the Isolated Acts Festival in Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Happy New Ears Festival and Serie West in Kortrijk and Ypres, Belgium. It has performed at the Théâtre La Chapelle and La Sala Rossa in Montreal and collaborated with the Devanaughn Theatre, Apollinaire Theatre, Kelly Donovan & Dancers, Contrapose Dance, and Doppelgänger Dance Collective in Boston. The first compact disc of the ensemble, Où est Fleuri Rose? et autres aventures, is available on the INNOVA label and on iTunes.
www.markwarhol.net

Fort Point Theatre Channel (FPTC) is dedicated to creating and sustaining new configurations of the performing arts. FPTC brings together an ensemble of artists from the worlds of theater, music, visual arts, and everything in between as a forum for collaborative expression while enriching the Fort Point community, Boston, and beyond. FPTC serves as an anchor for the Fort Point arts community, but also enjoys presenting their material in various venues throughout the city.
www.fortpointtheatrechannel.org

Green Street Studios is a center for movement and dance that enables artists, students, and audiences to explore the boundless potential of physical movement and the expressive capacity of the human body. Through its support of both established and emerging professionals, Green Street Studios provides students of all levels, and the wider public, the opportunity to explore and establish connections of their own to the traditions and commitments of disciplined movement.
www.greenstreetstudios.org

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