The Next Generation Of Dance-Makers To Be Featured At RDT's CURRENT, 4/12-14

The nation's oldest and most successful modern dance repertory company closes its 2017-2018 season with a tribute to the here and now with CURRENT, April 12-14 at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center. While known for presenting historical choreography, RDT is also dedicated to commissioning new work and nurturing the art of choreography.

Featuring two world premieres, CURRENT introduces a generation of new dance-makers who articulate the physical and emotional energy of contemporary life. It's fresh, it's current, it's now. This ground-breaking concert features work by RDT alumni Francisco Gella, Sarah Donohue, and Angela Banchero-Kelleher plus the winner of the 2017 REGALIA choreographer competition, Nichele Van Portfleet.

Based on a 1971 book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gwendolyn Brooks, Aloneness, a world premiere by Gella, explores the difference between being alone and being lonely. Using portable mirrors as set pieces, Gella's choreography conveys the rich contrast Brooks so elegantly identifies between loneliness and being alone by combining the ingredients of space, light, darkness, scale, and time in various configurations to evoke the emotional spectrum between loneliness, solitude, and love.

The Company will also perform a re-staging of Gella's 2015 work, Schubert Impromptu, a duet performed by Justin Bass and Jaclyn Brown. Of the piece which premiered in 2015, Kathy Zhou of SLUG Magazine stated "Their movements were an intriguing exchange, and they moved from supporting to constraining one another. A sense of defeat, as well as yearning, pervaded amid several gorgeous holds and moments of entanglement."

An emotional, profoundly philosophical piece, Material Tokens of the Freedom of Thought by Angela Banchero-Kelleher is a personal tribute to the choreographer's mother after her death. As Banchero-Kelleher describes, the piece is about "the cognitive dissonance that arose as I created a narrative that reflected our deep love for each other but that did not match the actual day-to-day turbulence that was also a reality. This piece is a material token of the process of negotiating that divide."

Sarah Donohue's Still Life with Flight is the blossoming of a danced relationship revealed through precise and surprising, full-bodied musical phrasing and superbly nuanced gesture. Donohue was on the Company from 2009-2014 and is now a professor of dance at Utah Valley University. Still Life was selected to be performed at the American College Dance Association's National Festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC in 2016.

The final piece on the program is Nichele Van Portfleet's world-premiere, Flood. Van Portfleet was the winner of the 2017 REGALIA choreographer competition and was chosen by the audience to win this commission.

In addition to this being the final concert of the 2017-2018 season, it will also be the last home season performance for dancers Justin Bass and Lacie Scott. Bass, who has danced with the Company since 2013 will be moving to New York City. And after dancing with RDT since 2014, Scott will be moving on to other pursuits in her career and with her family.

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