2020-21 Season

Princeton Dance Festival Reimagined 2020

The Program in Dance presented a reimagined virtual edition of the annual Princeton Dance Festival featuring six diverse, professional choreographers who created new dances with Princeton students despite the restrictions of the COVID pandemic.

Presented on November 23 and December 3, 4 + 5, 2020, each evening was a completely different and unique experience followed by a question and answer session with the choreographers.

VIDEO REPLAY: WATCH THE FESTIVAL

 

ABOUT THE PROJECTS

Led by Peter Chu, Francesca Harper, Rebecca Lazier, Dean Moss, Silas Riener, and Olivier Tarpaga, students explored the intersections of dance and multimedia performance, digital animation, filmmaking, site based work, and music.

Peter Chu’s project, Welcome HOME: The Princeton Series, was a thought-provoking yet playful journey that evoked the viewer’s spatial perception. In this live-streamed performance, scenes changed with precision timing and careful orchestration to transport viewers through viscerally charged worlds. Welcome HOME celebrated raw, curious, and honest communication!

Francesca Harper’s project, Emergence and Discovery: Digital Dance Portraits, facilitated collaborative construction and the development of 10 short, personal films allowing movement, filmmaking, images, text, music, and discovery in natural and industrial habitat to be accessible and serve as inspiration. As dance artists emerged from isolation and reshaped their lives, how did they preserve the moment? This existential question was translated into art.

Rebecca Lazier explores “Site Dance” with students asking: Where can dance happen? What can it do? Students shared site based performance projects built from research into their communities. Each project traced different intersections of personal, cultural, and geographic stories with movement, dance, and performance.

Dean Moss worked with student Lucy Sirrs to present “Live & Surreal: Lucy Sirrs,” a video dance project inspired by women’s historic struggle for reproductive rights and the surreal artwork of Martha Rosler. It portrayed her exploration of her desires, her pride, and her courage through the lens of her childhood bedroom. 

Silas Riener, a former member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, led a project in hybrid dance experiments blurring natural, virtual, and augmented environments. Rooted in Merce Cunningham Technique, students studied, practiced, and performed excerpts from Cunningham dances spanning over 50 years of choreography for stage and camera and arranged into a MinEvent in collaboration with video editor Daniel Madoff. In tandem students created new work for our evolving digital platform by adapting and misusing some of Cunningham’s methods: scores for chance procedures, indeterminacy, fixed and mobile camera perspectives, layers of structural complexity, and animation.

Olivier Tarpaga presented Out of Sync, a hybrid dance work/video choreographed remotely by Olivier Tarpaga in collaboration with the dancers. This Movement Percussion project utilized high intensity hybrid movement transformation practices rooted in structured live music improvisation and rhythms to create the final collaborative project.

PROGRAM INFORMATION

Program content for each evening’s performance is available digitally. View the programs for Princeton Dance Festival Reimagined »

VIDEO PREVIEW


The annual Princeton Dance Festival goes all virtual this year with performances on Nov. 23 and Dec. 3-5, 2020, featuring innovative works led by a diverse group of six choreographers.