University Dancers, Shifting Ground

UR Department of Theatre and Dance's assistant director of dance, Anne Van Gelder offers a preview of the University Dancers' 28th Annual Spring Concert, Shifting Ground running March 1-2 at 7:30 p.m. and March 3 at 2 p.m. Tickets are available here. 

Have you ever wished you could find just the right words to describe a clear night sky where the vast blackness is filled with brilliant stars?  Or perhaps you just said goodbye to a friend whom you know you’ll never see again.  How do you describe that feeling?  Sometimes you just can’t find the right words. 

A choreographer’s voice can be heard through the language of movement.  They communicate the simplest ideas to the most epic, each with the sensitivity that only movement can offer.  As Isadora Duncan famously said, “If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.”

With Shifting Ground: New Voices in Dance, University Dancers celebrates 28 years of nurturing exploration through movement as choreographers, designers and dancers investigate aspects of the human condition from isolation to loss to identity and community. This year's concert features Richmond students in original works created at Richmond through guest artist residencies, like the New Voices in Dance project for choreographers Kanji Segawa and Alexandra Damiani.

The combined artistry of Richmond’s resident costume designer, Johann Stegmeir, and lighting designer, Maja White, come to fruition beautifully with the work of our various choreographers and dancers.  Segawa’s work explores a barren environment through an athletic style that utilizes linear formations and free-flowing phrases; while in Damiani’s piece, dancers weave experiences of isolation, community and heritage through powerful solos of broken lines and poignant group vignettes. Christian von Howard choreographed his second work for the company, a piece that quietly echoes restrained power through mesmerizing circles, and Richmond faculty member Alicia Diaz, in her first work for University Dancers, calls forth a vast space that presents time-loosened recursive identities in a quartet for four women. Themes of loss, faith and the struggle to accept fate inspire the works of contemporary choreographer Diane Coburn Bruning, who comes to us from Washington, D.C.  Similarly, grief and denial are themes that run through my own work, set to a haunting composition by Benjamin Broening, associate professor of music. 

Brianna Leporace, a dance minor, and Natalie Perkins, a dance major, present the audience with fractured and destabilizing psychological domains, moods that resonate with the company’s collaborative final piece. University Dancers values and nurtures the collaborative process—especially with our student artists.  This year, Brianna Leporace collaborated with Heather Dunlap, a theatre arts and physics double major, on the lighting design for her piece.  Both women will present their work at the American College Dance Festival in March.  Natalie Perkins, who is also presenting her work at ACDF is collaborating with faculty member Maja E. White. Samantha Campbell, a senior majoring in mathematical economics, is designing the lights for company’s collaborative work. 

Many of the dancers in the company are Richmond (Artist) Scholars or Theatre and Dance Department scholarship recipients, and their areas of study range from dance and biology to business and physics. Our students are fortunate to have had the opportunity to work withartists of such caliber as resident choreographer, Alicia Diaz, and guest choreographers-in-residence Kanji Segawa, Alexandra Damiani, Diane Coburn Bruning and Christian von Howard. 

________________________________________________________________________

Anne Van Gelder is the assistant director of dance in the Department of Theatre and Dance. She teaches Productions Studies, Dance History-Theory II, all levels of Ballet technique and Jazz technique classes and serves as artistic director of University Dancers. 

Ms. Van Gelder holds degrees from Virginia Intermont College and the University of Utah in Choreography and Pedagogy. She performed throughout Virginia and Utah and has served as ballet mistress/régisseur for several companies. As a dancer, she worked with Alun Jones, Li-Chou Cheng, Ford Evans, Conrad Ludlow, Richard Munro and Tom Pazik among others.  She taught beginner to advanced levels of ballet technique at the University of Utah, Virginia Intermont College and the Willam F. Christensen Center for Dance. She regularly gives master classes at the American College Dance Festival and recently gave a workshop at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Fine Arts.  She has also created choreography for Theatre Bristol, Park City Shakespeare Festival, the Ogden Symphony and the Roanoke Symphony.  Her research interests lie in historic dance and she continues to study dance regularly, including Baroque dance workshops in NYC with noted historic dance experts, Thomas Baird and Paige Whitley Bauguess.  Ms. Van Gelder’s choreography has been seen throughout Virginia and Utah and recently, she worked with artists of the Saratov Academic Youth Theatre on their US premiere production of The Humpbacked Horse, featuring dances she re-set.  She created choreography for these URP&D productions:  Wings, The Tempest, Fiddler on the Roof and The Chairs and The Bald Soprano directed by Italian director and filmmaker, Paolo Landi. Most recently, Ms. Van Gelder served as period movement stylist for the URP&D production of Moliere’s The Learned Ladies.  She appeared as Hedy in UR’s 2009 production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, directed by Walter Schoen.