dance program

Dance For A Cause

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WORLD WATER DAY

SOURCE: An Evening of Performance in Celebration of World Water Day, to be presented Thursday March 22, 2018, at 7PM.

Temple dance students, in partnership with the Office of Sustainability at Temple University, present SOURCE, a celebration of World Water Day, Thursday, March 22, at 7pm. This performance will be in the Conwell Dance Theater, 1801 North Broad St., 5th Floor. SOURCE is an evening of dance performance, with a special presentation from environmental scientist and Temple University Professor, Fletcher Chmara-Huff, and will be followed by a reception to engage with presenting artists! The event is scheduled in observance of the United Nations Day of Action devoted to raising public attention to the critical water issues of our era. The performance is free and open to the public.

SOURCE will be the fourth-year Temple Dance students have celebrated World Water

Day with an evening of performance. This is also the first year that the Temple Dance Department is pairing up with the Office of Sustainability to continue the mission to raising awareness. Every year dance students create works responding to the spiritual and life giving properties of water, as well as the social issues around water access. This evening of performance links art, science, and activism, drawing from the notion that all three are needed to engage complex problems.

The performances and presentations will address a range of issues: the global water crisis both nationally and internationally, climate change, protecting our oceans, rivers and lakes, as well as meditative works looking at the molecular structure of water, how other cultures celebrate water, and reflecting on how we treat water in our everyday lives. Every performance has the goal to question the corporate view of water as a “resource” rather than an intrinsic right, in addition to honoring water as a source of life. The dancer/choreographers are looking forward to the engagement period after the performance, creating an atmosphere of active conversation, beyond passive reception of a “performance.”

SOURCE’s mission is not only to observe and celebrate World Water Day, but to invite

the Philadelphia community to join us in staying informed and involved with the issues that

surround water today. Water has been privatized in many places around the globe with

devastating consequences for the communities whose water is sold to large

corporations. SOURCE explores and advocates for useful responses to a global crisis that threatens the stability and subsequent motility of all living bodies.

SOURCE will include works choreographed by Angela Watson, Avi Wolf Borouchoff, Dawn States, Enya-Kalia Jordan,Kailia Kingsford Smith, Prudence Anne Amsden, Teresa Barr, Tyra Jones-Blain,Ying Yu, and additional contributions from Temple’s Environmental Studies majors. SOURCE is directed by Prudence Anne Amsden with assistance from Avi Wolf Borouchoff and Dawn States, and facilitated by Professor Merián Soto and Professor Fletcher Chmara-Huff.

Please join us for SOURCE, an evening of performance to celebrate World Water Day. Check out a review of a past event by Julia Davis in GreenPhillyBlog.

 

Summer Dance Research

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A perk of being part of the Honors Program at Temple University is that my scholarship provides me with a $4,000 stipend every summer to partake in an internship or research project. I was able to attend two dance intensives, the Nathan Trice Summer Intensive and the Bates Dance Festival, with the intent of furthering my dance and choreographic research.

 

At the Nathan Trice Summer Intensive, I was able to study with choreographer Nathan Trice, who taught both his rigorous modern technique and three of his works. I had trained with him in high school, so it was really nice to reconnect with him and his flowy and qualitative movement style. I plan to attend the intensive again next summer. At Bates Dance Festival, I took four classes – contact improvisation with Chris Aiken, modern floorwork technique with Claudia Lavista of Delfos, modern technique with Jen Nugent, and yoga with Robbie Cook. It was three weeks of very hard work, yet I was able to meet dancers and teachers from all over the world. The Bates Dance Festival is a very cooperative and non-competitive environment in which students can study, perform and create new work. It was an extremely rewarding experience.

 

To finalize my summer, I got involved with The Rockaway Project, a documentary theater and photography exhibition about the spirit of Rockaway Beach in Queens, NY. Rockaway Beach was heavily devastated by Hurricane Sandy, and this production was a reminder of how well the small town pulled itself together. The director, Oona Roche, asked me to choreograph a short piece to go alongside a song that she wrote and sang about the ocean. We ended up performing the production at a small venue in Fort Tilden, a beautiful area of Rockaway. My summer experiences left me excited to bring my new kinesthetic understandings and choreographic outlook to the classroom environment.

-Elisa Hernandez, 2nd Year BFA Student