Portland Ovations to Welcome Lucky Plush Dance Company, 5/6

Portland Ovations presents contemporary dance company Lucky Plush performing The Queue at Westbrook Performing Arts Center on Wednesday, May 6th at 7:30pm.

Equal parts dance and theater,The Queue unfolds in a fictional airport, where travelers stumble humorously, tragically and awkwardly into each other's private lives. Created by Lucky Plush founder/director Julia Rhodes and collaborator Leslie Danzig, The Queue finds its influences in early 20th-century forms of slapstick, vaudeville, Busby Berkeley-style choreography, creaky one-act plays and a 1746 farcical play about a family inheritance. These sources and performance vocabularies collide with contemporary dance and the distinctly non-theatrical context of waiting to create a dance-theater production, showcasing Lucky Plush's signature blend of immediacy, humor and kineticism.

On Monday, May 4th between 6pm and 8pm at The Ballroom of Mechanics Hall 519 Congress Street in Portland, ME - intermediate to advanced dancers and thespians are invited for a 2-hour dance/theatre workshop with Julia Rhoads, artistic director of Lucky Plush. The workshop will explore the relationship between dance, performance and visual storytelling. Cost is $35. To register, please email Portland Ovations Offstage:offstage@portlandovations.org or call (207) 773-3150 ext. 3.

On Wednesday night at 6:30PM one hour prior to the performance at Westbrook Performing Arts Center Ovations Offstage offers a pre-performance lecture with Paul Sarvis, Chair of Bowdoin College's Department of Theater and Dance. He will discuss Lucky Plush's new work in relation to other modern and contemporary choreogrphers' collaborative experiments in narrative performance.

Tickets for Lucky Plush The Queue range from $25.20 to $32.40 for Ovations' Members and from $28 to $36 for the general public, a limited amount of $15 student tickets are also available. To purchase tickets, visit www.portlandovations.org, contact PortTIX at 207.842.0800 or stop by the box office window at Merrill Auditorium.