Kaleido - CWRU Spring Dance Concert

Down and Through, restaged for five male dancers, is a work by Gregoire that explores one’s experience with pain, grief, and emotional boundaries. The dancers personify this experience through their bodily contact, struggling against the barriers until there is nowhere to go but up.

Zhao’s solo, She’d, uses a score by Arvo Part and special costuming to reveal the female figure’s inner world, and her journey of self-discovery and liberation. Her group work is set to all-male choral music by Eero Hämeenniemi. An all female cast embodies the influences of the weight of memory. The weight drags and disturbs, but it also triggers rebirth from deconstruction.

Another premiere, Duality, is a duet for two women choreographed by Gregoire. Driven by music from composer John Psathas, this work explores contrasting movement dynamics with variations in time and space. He will also restage Strange Gardens, a responsive-media infused work by Gary Galbraith. Created in 2016, a visually rich wonderland is created, manipulated, and transformed with a trio of dancers and their kinetic journey through space.

Zhao will also restage January Thirtyfirst, a 2003 duet choreographed by CWRU alumna Lin Batsheva Kahn. With music by Phillip Glass and a narrated poem by Kahn, this powerful work depicts the grief and mutual support of a brother and sister at the moment of their mother’s death. The dancers show a painful journey through grief filled with anticipation, anger, and anxiety before transitioning into sad acceptance.

Teeter will premiere a new work titled Chasing Unison. With a string quartet performing two fugues by J.S. Bach onstage, the four dancers each represent one of the quartet voices. As the work develops the dancers explore their connection to the music and to each other, wondering how to be united in such a complex, contrapuntal world.