Winter Dance Concert at REDCAT

Above: ‘37.2 degrees,’ an abstract dance piece by Yuanyuan Wang, performed by the Beijing Dance Theatre.

Beijing-based dance artist and CalArts alumna Yuanyuan Wang (Dance MFA 03) spent two weeks at CalArts earlier this semester as a visiting artist to set a new work, Poison 1, which debuts during the Winter Dance Concert 2015. The annual year-end concert, presented by The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance, was held this past weekend at CalArts with two additional performances on Dec. 18-19 at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT).

As the co-founder and artistic director of the Beijing Dance Theater, Wang produces innovative, contemporary dance works that are rooted in Chinese traditions. “For me, dance is a kind of language,” said Wang, who adds that her pieces are the ways she communicate stories and meaning to audiences. Poison I is a work for seven dancers set to music by Radian, an experimental music group from Austria.

CalArts’ dancers rehearse ‘Cubicle’ for the Winter Dance Concert 2015. (Image: The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance at CalArts)

CalArts faculty Rosanna Gamson also premieres Imagine We Are Already Shadows, a five-dancer piece that explores the connection between dreaming and improvisation. Created in collaboration with award-winning lighting designer and School of Theater faculty Anne Militello, the piece uses lighting to reinforce themes. From the press release: “In Gamson’s dance triptych, light and dark become metaphors for intimacy and disconnection as the extreme physicality of the dancing spills across the shifting landscapes of Militello’s design.”

In addition to the premiering pieces, the Winter Dance Concert also features Cubicle, a work adapted for CalArts by the Los Angeles-based Diavolo | Architecture in Motion. The dance company, founded by CalArts alum Jacques Heim (Dance MFA 91), uses dance to explore the relationship between the human body and its architectural environment—in this case a monotonous office space.