An Evening of Dance

Location & Showtimes

Nancy Smith Fichter Dance Theatre in Montgomery Hall, located on the FSU campus.
November 6, 2015 at 8:00 pm
November 7, 2015 at 2:00 and 8 pm
A pre-show improvisational performance will begin at 7:15 and 1:15 respectively.

Tickets

Adults: $18.00
Senior Citizens $16.00
Children and non-FSU students: $12.00
FSU students with ID: $10.00
All seating is general admission.

For ticket information, contact the Fine Arts Tickets Office at 850-644-6500 or online at www.ticket.fsu.edu. Tickets may also be purchased directly before each performance and November 5 & 6, 12-4 pm at Montgomery Hall. For more information call Joyce Fausone at 850.645.2449 or via email at jfausone@fsu.edu, or check online at dance.fsu.edu.

Additional Information

During this year’s performances of An Evening of Dance, the School of Dance will not only be showcasing the versatile talents of its choreographers and performers, but will also be celebrating the career of Professor Anthony Morgan who is retiring this December. Morgan has been imparting his knowledge of the Martha Graham technique to students since he joined the School of Dance in 1983. Throughout his tenure at FSU he has presented over fifty works including many premieres and pieces he later set on The Anthony Morgan Dance Company in New York. While at FSU, Morgan performed choreography by Doris Humphrey, Lester Horton, and School of Dance founder Nancy Smith Fichter, as well as many graduate and undergraduate works. He began teaching choreography classes in 1992, and has especially relished watching his students discover their own choreographic voices.

Anthony Morgan

Morgan is grateful to have been a part of the deep history of dance at FSU, he is enjoying his last semester and hopes to leave his students wanting more. This fall, Morgan re-staged his work Punctuated Equilibrium for An Evening of Dance. The piece features four dancers performing daring acts and playful feats with eight foot ladders to a musical score by Patrick Pennefather. Originally choreographed in 1994 and re-mounted in 1997 and 2002, Morgan describes the work as a “construction site turned into a circus”.

An Evening of Dance will also present the choreography of guest artist Alex Ketley, returning choreographic fellow of the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC), as well as works by five School of Dance faculty members including a dance film by faculty member Hannah Schwadron.

Tim Glenn’s work, aXis, originally premiered in 2010 at FSU. In continual transformation, aXisbegan as Across, Through a work created in 1995 for the Tim Glenn & Company Repertory Ensemble. The current evolution of aXis features an original musical score by School of Dance faculty member Dan Smith entitled Stardust. Glenn has been assisted in the restaging by Santa Fe College Assistant Professor Sarah Harkness-Sebastian, a member of the original cast.

Hannah Schwadron’s choreography for the dance film Klasse, directed by filmmaker and FSU School of Communication Faculty member, Malia Bruker, situates viewers in war-torn Hamburg, Germany in the midst of the Holocaust. Set in a historical classroom at the school where Schwadron’s grandmother was once a student, the work breathes renewed life into letters written between classmates as they left one-by-one on the kindertransport out of the country. Schwadron spent an intimate and intense period working with professional dancers and middle school students from the Ida-Ehre-Schule to generate the material for the film. The work examines changing ideas about Holocaust education and its relationship to contemporary situations.

Anjali Austin will present THREADS, a solo performance which developed out of research inspired by a collection of 33 quilts she inherited from her grandmother, Ms. Gussie Arnold Hill. A fifth generation Floridian, Austin says, in the work “I investigate and illuminate the African-American experience in the South through personal family histories, and the path that led to my career in ballet”. Her interdisciplinary research has resulted in quilt exhibitions and performances throughout the United States.

With a cast of thirteen dancers, Rick McCullough will be premiering a contemporary ballet piece titled Clarion. The three movement work features an extended duet and examines themes of dominance and jealousy. McCullough describes the electronic score by Anna Meredith as “driving, mysterious, and sometimes mystical”.

Alex Ketley, a San Francisco-based choreographer and the director of the contemporary dance company The Foundry, returned to FSU this fall through MANCC to develop his new work, Deep South. After his residency company members Marlie Couto, Courtney Mazeika, and Sarah Woods remained at FSU to stage an excerpt from Ketley’s work Poem. The work engages an array of choreographic impulses Ketley has pursued over the last several years. Ranging from The Foundry’s studies in the studio, to traveling projects that explore what dance means to people throughout rural parts of the United States, these influences mingle in a work that seeks varying ways movement can achieve a sense of visual traction.