The Hope College Department of Dance is hosting its Fall Student Dance Showcase on Friday-Saturday, Nov. 21-22, at 8 p.m. at the Dow Center and Monday-Tuesday, Nov. 24-25, at 8 p.m. at the Knickerbocker Theatre in downtown Holland.
The public is invited. Admission is free.
The bi-annual showcase of student choreography is designed to highlight the creativity, ingenuity and vibrancy of the student dance artists at Hope. The concerts are student-choreographed, student-performed, and student-run.
The program for each of the concert venues will be different, with the pieces matched to the setting that best suits them. Works selected for the Dow “white box” space will have the benefit of a more open, intimate and personal environment with a white floor and backdrop, while the pieces for the Knickerbocker will have the benefit of a traditional “black box” theater with additional technical capacities.
Every year those students who contribute to the Student Dance Showcase participate in a mentoring and adjudication process. Faculty producers Steven Iannacone and Matthew Farmer meet with each student choreographer several times to give feedback through the student’s creative process. The final aspect of the presenting process consists of the Department of Dance inviting professional choreographers to Hope’s campus to adjudicate the students works, teach several master classes, and hold auditions for his/her dance company. This year, there are two guest adjudicators, Avi Kaiser and Sergio Antonino.
Kaiser and Antonino direct the dance space “The Roof” in Duisburg, Germany, and they serve as artists-in-residence of the city of Duisburg and the Lehmbruck Museum for Contemporary Art. They have co-produced and presented work in Germany, Italy, Poland, USA, Canada, Turkey, Austria, Israel and Belgium.
Kaiser was trained at the Bat Dor school of dance and was a dancer with the Bat Sheva dance company working with, among others, Glen Tetly and Kurt Joss. He founded his own dance ensemble, Blue RAN Dances, in Brussels in 1986. Kaiser collaborated closely with Susanne Linke from 1991, and performed in her two-men pieces and choreographed several works with her. Among other work, in 2006 he created a ballet for the opera La Favorite (Donizetti) at the Opernhaus Zürich directed by Marc Minkowski.
Antonino received his dance education at the I.A.L.S. Center of Dance –Rome, at the S.P.I.D Professional School of Italian Dance-Milan. In 2001 he graduated from the Scuola d’arte Drammatica Paolo Grassi Milan, having studied in the dance theater department, and he received a Master degree in the University LA SAPIENZA of Rome at the Faculty of Humane Sciences in 2003. Among other work, he was invited to create a choreography for the Biennale di Venezia, Millimetri in 2005.
The Dow Center is located at 168 E. 13th St., on the corner of 13th Street and Columbia Avenue. The Knickerbocker Theatre in downtown Holland is located at 86 E. Eighth St.