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Danceworks Studio A gets a great work out. It’s filled with moving bodies all day and well into the night. It converts into our black box theatre for concerts. It has housed everything from birthday parties to salsa parties. It’s been the home of many receptions and celebrations.
But this is the first time it will be converted into a dance club! Leave it to Dani Kuepper and Danceworks Performance Company to come up with the bar/club, pop-culture setting in which this concert takes place. Jason Powell (who recently portrayed the duplicitous devil in Temptation’s Snare) is back! I will guarantee you’ll have great fun when Jason is writing music, lyrics and performing alongside DPC’s kicks, quirks and intended tumbles.
DPC stopping to pose for a picture during a Plugged In rehearsal (Liz Zastrow, Alberto, Christal in front; Kim, Dani, Melissa, Andrew Zanoni (Guest Artist), Gina standing. (Liz Tesch, Joelle Worm not pictured)
I peeked in on a DPC rehearsal this week to see what happens when you make a dance out of 1980’s pop music. You may not know that music doesn’t always inspire the movement in contemporary dance and is often added or changed after the choreography has been developed.
In our upcoming concert, Plugged In, the movement is definitely inspired by the music, as well as by music videos and the original MTV generation. Dani Kuepper says, “This concert is about what happens when you configure and reconfigure pop culture.”
I watched a run of Kim Johnson-Rockefellow’s “Ocular Sound” set to “Coke” by Pawel. The dancers are the music. They’re the notes on the page. Their feet keep the beat and their arms propel a lyrical line of melody. They’re chords on the score then the full instrumentation. They’re a run-on sentence, gelling together then changing. “It’s seeing the beats the DJ layers and mixes,” Kim said later.
Yay! I got it!
Every DPC dancer is contributing choreography inspired by the songs they have loved. With Dani giving choreographic assignments to create the movement, you can be sure the movement invention is pushed to its extreme. It’s been a great collaborative effort for our company and a very fitting closer to this collaborative DPC concert season.
Come on and have some fun! You can buy tickets here.
For additional help purchasing tickets, check out our step-by-step instructional PDF.
Performance Dates and Times:
Thursdays, April 24 & May 8, 2014: 8:30pm
Fridays, April 25 & May 9, 2014: 7:30pm
Saturdays, April 26 & May 10, 2014: 7:30pm
Danceworks Performance Company: Melissa Anderson, Alberto Cambra, Kim Johnson, Dani Kuepper, Gina Laurenzi, Liz Tesch, Christal Wagner, Joelle Worm, Liz Zastrow
Plugged In Guest Artists: Jason Powell, Tyrone “DJ Bizzon” Miller, Richard Brasfield, Rasheeda Paniell, Samantha Patrick, Andrew Zanoni
Welcome to the Danceworks blog, where we're hoping to share a little bit more about the heart and soul behind Danceworks… what made us join the dance and keeps us dancing, what keeps us inspired, and where we can share some of the stories worth telling.
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