Culture
Last Dance: OU Seniors’ Work Showcased at Annual Concert
By: Earlyn Whitehead
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This weekend, Ohio University School of Dance seniors will showcase their work during the annual Senior Dance Concert, taking place Saturday at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. All performances will be held in the Shirley Wimmer Theater, located in Putnam Hall.
The concert will include four group and three solo dances created by the seniors as part of their senior capstone projects.
In her piece, Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace, Mariah Berardelli explores the way people hold their emotions in until they reach a breaking point. The music, a piece by Braden Pantoli called “Unspoken,” helps capture the intensity of the emotions.
In Petrichor, Steven P. Evans uses the music of composer Eric Whitacre’s Cloudburst to allude to a storm, with dancers creating an illusion of wind, heavy rain, boisterous thunder and the crackle of bright lightning.
Feeling Sound is a reflection of choreographer Alicia Hann’s favorite genre of music, rock and roll, and how it can make a listener feel. The music (“Tarantism”) was created by Laser Dog, a band based in Columbus, Ohio.
Set to an eerie sound score by Luis Flores, Kelsey Lynn Maiolo’s septet Without .25 translates mental struggles into accelerated, frantic movements.
Kimberly Murry draws inspiration from the documentary Whore’s Glory in her solo, Dive into my Darkness, Hanging from my Soul. Murry questions the connection between the physical and the mental and how the two states can be separated as a coping mechanism, particularly for women who exchange their bodies for monetary compensation.
Dressed in a reflective costume of streaming metallic ribbon, Michael O’Neill dances himself in and out of entanglements with abundant shiny strips in his solo, Lushhh. As the fringy ribbon tosses, flies and floats along with all of O’Neill’s movements, it creates a range of sound, from waves washing up on the shore to a pompom shaking vigorously in the wind.
Earlyn Whitehead’s piece, Collective Dimensions, fills the stage with nine dancers who invest themselves in an explorative journey, moving to the eccentric, dynamic and groovy sound of Static Island’s “Funky Junky.”
Tickets may be purchased at the Box Office at Templeton-Blackburn Alumni Memorial Auditorium. General Admission is $6 and free for Ohio University students with a valid I.D. Phone (740) 593-1780 for ticket information.