Although it still feels like winter outside, the Elon University Dance Company is hard at work preparing for this year’s spring dance concert, titled “Looking Back to Spring Forward.”
The show will run March 13 to 15 in McCrary Theatre. The program will include five original works by the Elon University dance faculty with one piece by guest artist Diane Coburn Bruning.
Artistic director Lauren Kearns said she often uses autobiography as a creative springboard and is inspired by how investigating reflection and memory can lay the groundwork for personal, social, cultural or political evolution.
“I thought designing a concert around this theme would be a creative, challenging and thought-provoking experience for the artists, dancers and audience,” Kearns said.
Bruning’s piece, “torrid zone,” was originally commissioned by the Five Colleges Dance Department a few years ago and has been performed by the Skidmore and Bucknell Dance Departments.
Senior Jennifer McAllister has been involved with the spring concert every year since her freshman at Elon.
“I feel like it’s a culmination of all of my dancing experiences at Elon. It’s my final hoorah before I go out into the real world, where I don’t know when I’ll get to perform again,” McAllister said. “I guarantee I will be sobbing by the end from excitement and sadness combined.”
McAllister will dance as lead soloist in Kearn’s piece and will also appear in adjunct assistant professor of dance Natalie Marrone’s piece, which was altered for the concert.
“In the fall of 2012 my dance company and I were awarded the NC Dance Alliance Choreography Fellowship, which supported the creation of this work,” Marrone said. “I re-worked the piece in collaboration with the Elon students.”
Her work, “The Sisters of Sardinia,” is a trio inspired by the story of Celeste Noli who, after witnessing the drowning of one of her sisters, seeks the assistance of a traditional Sardinian healing woman.
Marrone said she has been researching vernacular healing traditions from Southern Italy and incorporating them into dances since 2007.
“The dance is complicated by its challenging and athletic contemporary movement that fuses vernacular healing dance movements with traditional techniques such as modern dance, ballet and jazz,” Marrone said. “The Elon dancers have worked tirelessly to rise to the challenge both emotionally and physically.”
The program will also feature works by staff members Jen Metcalf, Sara Tourek and Jason Aryeh.
“Overall, I feel like this concert is very reflective for the choreographers, the dancers and the dance program as a whole,” McAllister said. “We’ve grown so much as a program just over the past few years, and I feel like we need to take the time to appreciate how far we’ve come and get excited for the future.”