UCSB Theater/Dance Presents Spring Dance Concert FRACTURE

UC Santa Barbara, Department of Theater and Dance offers a student-centered Spring Dance Concert Fracture, comprised of a diverse range of new choreographic voices by senior BFA dance majors (Colin Sneddon, Madeline Takemori, Sergio Barrientos, Johnny Cox, Jasmine Agredano and Luis Gomez) and a piece by acclaimed New York choreographer Doug Elkins. Community members will recall Doug Elkins residency at the Lobero Theater in fall 2018 with DanceWorks. Elements of Elkins' intellectual and physical approach to choreography have found their way into the choreographic processes of our six BFA choreographers. All the students have unique voices tackling material that stems from pure movement invention, to cult/group dynamic behavior and loss of memory through the ravages of Alzheimer's disease. Director of Dance and Vice-Chair Christina McCarthy directs the concert.

UCSB's dance concerts also serve as a laboratory for creative collaboration, featuring fresh, visionary costumes and lighting by our talented design students. Design students, Jeffrey Hampton, Allison McSwain, Daniela Sherwin, Savannah Lo, Antonio Cruz Ventura, Amanda Hughes, Marguerite Nguyen, Sydney Tollefson are closely advised by Lighting Director Vickie Scott and Costume Director Ann Bruice.

Opening the concert, Colin Sneedon, in his work The Fading of Echoic Memory, weaves a theater/dance piece full of evocative images of ghost like women flowing around the edges of the central male character and his descent into loss of self, music, and connection with the outside world as he struggles with loss of memory. Sneddon's style has a direct theatrical approach that blends pedestrian moments with fluid choreographic phrases to underline the permeable border between reality and thought.

Sergio Barrientos explores elements of conformity in his work Fashion Cult. In his high energy and physicalized world of movement, he has created a work that flows in an out of story in a dream-like state following the journey of a singular figure in a conforming and dark society. Examining the parallels between the fashion industry and cultism, Barrientos is interested in the exclusivity in both ideologies and how devotion to fashion or a cult can blind one's judgment.

Working from a different lens, Maddie Takemori looks at the mind of the individual and how they can shift too far into altruism or narcissism that they create their own cult like prison of conformity to a way of life that can be limiting and unbalanced. Ced r displays Takemori's detail-oriented and subtle movement vocabulary in a series of physical explorations that offer an intriguingly guarded manifestation of the inner mind. With the dancers near each other in space, but clearly on a solo journey through their own inner world, Takemori creates a physical plane that is as ethereal as thought itself.

Johnny Cox's Disco Dream is a 70's themed high energy and humorous dance theater experience. Playing with clich d and stereotypical gender expressions and behaviors, audiences meet a cast of characters who crack them up. While exploring frisky score of 1970's disco songs, the gender binary and all those who do not fit the male or female box are reconsidered.

In the piece Node, Jasmine Agredano digs deep into a musical score of jazz, R&B and hip hop music both cutting and manipulating the music to create a new collage of sound. Agredano takes her source dance material and explores the reordering of material to create a dense energy shifting landscape. The music is at times embodied in direct expression of rhythm and melody line, and at times responding in counterpoint to it. The dancers are a big part of this process, bringing forth each of their own interpretations of the movement.

Luis Gomez uses a three way split screen of ideas in his piece Live Scan. With focus bouncing between video projection of brain imagery, the activities of a patient under the care of a doctor assessing her mental focus, and a chorus of dancers representing the electronic and physiological aspects of the patient's brain, activity flows in a dissonant stream of consciousness that emulates the multiple inputs vying for attention in the brain of someone dealing with ADHD.

Alongside these student works, a UCSB Dance Company will perform The Kintsugi Proxies, which is a piece excerpted and adapted from Doug Elkins choreography, etc.'s Kintsugi (2018). During the 2018 residency in Lobero Theater, Elkins created Kintsugi for his company. He returned to Santa Barbara in January 2019 to set portions of this work on UCSB Dance Company for their European tour and to be performed on Fracture. Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer resin mixed with gold. The literal translation is golden joinery: the process transforms broken pieces into objects of beauty the art of embracing damage. The pristine is less beautiful than the broken.

The senior BFA dance majors work in close collaboration with the lighting, scenic and costume design students to express their new and vibrant ideas informed by their training and their exposure to brilliant artists like Mr. Elkins. His sensibilities about athleticism, partnering intricacy, story, humanity and rhythmic counterpoint are present in small ways throughout the work of the student choreographers. The result is a collage of ideas, coalescing in an evening of dance that will take you on a journey through ideas of the body and mind, showcasing the focused work of all students involved as choreographers, performers and designers. Performances are April 11, 12 and 13 at 8pm and April 14 at 2pm in the UCSB Hatlen Theater.