UNCSA graduating dancers show Pluck

University of North Carolina School of the Arts
dance students perform a work by Kimberly Bartosik.
All photos by Peter Mueller

Students of the 2015 graduating contemporary dance class of University of North Carolina School of the Arts are excitedly preparing to perform next month at New York's Ailey Citigroup Theater-The Joan Weill Center for Dance. UNCSA's annual Pluck Project opens opportunities for students to jump-start careers by forging connections to established choreographers and other professionals in the field. This year, in addition to student-created solos, the culminating presentation features an ensemble piece by noted New York dance artist Kimberly Bartosik.

"The students financed the entire trip themselves through grassroots fundraising to pay for theater rental, transportation and more," Bartosik says, marveling at their ingenuity and commitment. "They're even responsible for rehearsing my piece in my absence--without any faculty oversight. And many of them haven't ever been to New York!"

Developing The Palpable Space in Between with UNCSA students stretched her practice.

"I created the piece when I spent a semester at UNCSA--my alma mater--in fall 2013," she says. "It totally changed my perception about what was possible with young dancers and led to a much deeper exploration of form than I had ever experienced. I experimented with ideas I normally censor from my professional work but which, I felt, had a place here--unison movement, uncomplicated beauty. It was really invigorating, and I'm still learning from it."

The Palpable Space in Between, Bartosik says, connects to her concerns about the violence in our culture.

"These kids were so young that I couldn't ask them to take the same emotional risks that I ask of my professional performers. However, they went far and deep and totally got it."

See The Palpable Space in Between at a free presentation on Monday, March 9, 7pm at Ailey Citigroup Theater-The Joan Weill Center for Dance. Reservations are recommended and can be made by email to mountj@uncsa.edu. Show your support with a tax-deductible donations here.

The Pluck Project Class of 2015

Graham Cole

Javier Colon

David Ferguson

William Fowler

Margaret Jones

Shyanne Ramsey

Bailey Reese

Shelby Ring

Nick Rodriques

Casey Sauls

Kellyn Thornburg

Ailey Citigroup Theater-The Joan Weill Center for Dance
405 West 55th Street (at 9th Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Zuŝtiak: at home in the funhouse

Lindsey Dietz Marchant (left) and Elena Demyanenko

of Pavel Zuŝtiak/Palissimo
in Zuŝtiak's Weddings and Beheadings
(Photo: Julie Lemberger for the 92nd Street Y)

You're already a habitant of Pavel Zuŝtiak's Mardi Gras funhouse. By the time his new work--Weddings and Beheadings--reveals its solemn, surprise ending, you probably won't need that fact to be made plain. You're human, he's had his eyes on you, and you can feel it.

In this sprawling, 80-minute piece, Zuŝtiak animates a yin/yang of male and female, light and darkness, grace and awkwardness, tenderness and aggression, pleasure and fear, the theatrical and the genuine, the clothed and the unclothed, the corporeal and the ghostly, presence and absence, present and past. The way in which yin slips around the base of yang, the way they swirl together and lock into one entity, reflects how this dance-theater work presents a startling palette of opposites.

Shifting, evolving images--some very old found portrait photos, shots of the dancers and x-rays--are projected onto a scrim, the backdrop and other surfaces. The performers--when not stark, raving nude, which is often--make numerous costume and identity changes. Joe Levasseur's lighting environment creates alternating and disturbing feelings of intimacy and distance, the mysterious and the mundane. Zuŝtiak's sound design marches against the ear and nerves. Some action strays into the margins of the stage, and we follow, sneaking peeks there before returning our gaze to the main event.

Sho Ikushima (left) and Jeff Kent Jacobs
(Photo: Julie Lemberger for the 92nd Street Y)

Elena Demyanenko, Sho Ikushima, Jeff Kent Jacobs and Lindsey Dietz Marchant--an amazing cast--help pull together this jumble of theatrical elements, this ambiguity of mood, motion and meaning. Watch, especially, for smoothly-rendered duets between the men and for the way that Dietz Marchant always appears to be suspended in dark space, even when there's light all around her, straining against balance, active and complex within her waiting.

Zuŝtiak's other fine collaborators include Robert Flynt (projections concept and images); Keith Skretch (projections design and animation) and Nick Vaughn (set and costumes).

A presentation of the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival, Weddings and Beheadings continues its run Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 2pm at the Ailey Citigroup Theater at the Joan Weill Center for Dance, 405 West 55th Street at 9th Avenue.

Click here for ticketing information.