FLY: Five First Ladies of Dance
Carmen de Lavallade, Bebe Miller, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Germaine Acogny and Dianne McIntyre
WHEN: Saturday, December 11, at 7:30 PM and Sunday, December 12, at 3 PM
WHERE: NJPAC, One Center Street, Newark
TICKETS: $36 & $39; Box Office (Toll-Free): 888.466.5722
If you like dance, you won’t want to miss this celebratory evening that welcomes these five ground-breaking dancer-choreographers, who have been raising the bar for decades.
In Fly each appears in a rarely-performed, signature solo work: Bebe Miller’s classic Rain, in which the choreographer powerfully portrays “a woman weighted down by a host of cares, yet refusing to be totally crushed by them” (New York Times); Urban Bush Women innovator Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s recent Bring ‘Em Home, which explores the New Orleans tradition of Second Line dancing while commenting on the failed efforts to assist those displaced by Hurricane Katrina; Dianne McIntyre’s If You Don’t Know, set to a piano score composed by Olu Dara, which fuses improvisational movement and jazz to explore a series of African American lives; contemporary African dance master Germaine Acogny’s Untitled, a riveting new solo that incorporates video and original music to imagine an Africa with a powerful female President; and Carmen de Lavallade in a recreation of her role in The Creation, Geoffrey Holder’s classic dance that tells the Biblical story of creation as interpreted in a poem by James Weldon Johnson.
“(These women) have been honing their voices for many years,” says The New York Times. “It shows; theirs is work to savor.” FLY: Five First Ladies of Dance is a project of 651 ARTS.
Funded in part by the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and additional funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Community Connections Fund of the MetLife Foundation.
This tour of FLY: Five First Ladies of Dance is made possible by a grant from Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.
