Urban Bush Women kick off the series Feb. 13 with “Hair & Other Stories.”
Urban Bush Women -- they dance, they act, and they test the ground on which your preconceived ideas about contemporary dance have been built, all with the goal of engaging you -- the audience -- in a communal experience.
All of that and more is planned for 8 p.m. Tuesday when the six-member New York troupe performs at Cape Fear Community College’s Wilson Center. Urban Bush Women are the first of three contemporary dance companies visiting the Wilson Center venue between now and April 5 as part of the venue's 2018 immersive dance series.
Urban Bush Women's "Hair & Other Stories" teaser fromUrban Bush Women onVimeo.
Wilson Center director Shane Fernando said the series continues the effort begun about two years ago with Thalian Hall and the Office of the Arts at the University of North Carolina Wilmington to present the finest, most challenging and diverse array of dance possible to an area that is considered a "dance desert" by the Atlanta-based South Arts’ dance touring initiative.
Almost from the beginning of the Wilson Center dance series, which was originally planned for the venue's studio theater, Fernando has broken new ground, bringing the dancers and audience together on the main stage for the kind of intimate performance that leaves both affected.
“The experience, in terms of taking people out of their comfort zone, is the same for the dancers and dance makers,” Fernando said. “In terms of the dancers … they can see the audience members' faces. They can actually make eye contact with them, and it's definitely a very different experience for them, too.”
Much thought goes into what companies to book for such a series, but Fernando said it was a bit of synchronicity that all of the companies in the series are led by women.
“It just happened naturally that way, which was very exciting” he said.
But while the choreographers are all women, that's where the similarities end. Which, it’s fair to say, is exciting also.
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On March 23, Hou Ying will offer up a new work, “Tu Tu.” Ying’s work, steeped in the disciplines of traditional Chinese, ballet, Beijing opera and martial arts, merges with the dance lineage of such icons of American modernism as Martha Graham, Jose Limon, Trisha Brown, and Merce Cunningham. “Tu Tu,” Fernando said, “is a study of time and space and how we as humans live in that time and space with each other.”
April 5 will bring Sidra Bell Dance New York and its new work, "MÖNSTER OUTSIDE" (yes, all caps!), a collaboration with Swedish composer Per Störby Jutbring. An exploration of what it is to be an "outsider," it incorporates scenic and lighting design as well as video mapping, in which people and objects have their own video or projection that moves around with them.
MÖNSTER OUTSIDE (World Premiere- November 2017) fromSidra Bell Dance New York onVimeo.
As mentioned, the series starts Tuesday with Urban Bush Women and their new piece, “Hair & Other Stories.” There is a lot of localization within the work, Fernando said.
“It is crated from actual stories from actual people, and then the dance comes out of these stories. So it's definitely a very specific type of storytelling.”
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