Jessica Lang Dance to Perform at Jorgensen, 11/7

The superbly cutting-edge Jessica Lang Dance will perform its newest work, Within the Space I Hold, and five other dance pieces at Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts on Thursday,

Nov. 7, 2013, at 7:30 p.m. Within was performed in a world premiere last summer at Jacob's Pillow in Becket, MA.

The Nov. 7 performance will include a question-and-answer session with artists afterward.

Jessica Lang Dance is only two years old but has been blessed by Baryshnikov, who uttered during a New York performance, "This company is really great. She has a classical structure with a modern aesthetic."

Lang, one of the few female choreographers on the main stage and a Juilliard-trained former dancer with Twyla Tharp, has been called "a master of visual composition" by Dance Magazine. She has created more than 80 works for companies such as Birmingham Royal Ballet, Joffrey Ballet, Kansas City Ballet, Cincinnati Ballet, Colorado Ballet, Ballet San Jose, Richmond Ballet, Pennsylvania Ballet, Ailey II, Hubbard Street 2 and New York City Ballet's Choreographic Institute. American Ballet Theatre presented her work, Splendid Isolation III, at the Metropolitan Opera House in 2008 and 2011.

Her troupe was launched when, in 2010, it earned a Joyce Theater Residency supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and in 2012 made its debut at the Pillow, the dance mecca in the Berkshires. Besides the premiere last summer, Lang directed and choreographed Pergolesi's opera Stabat Mater for Glimmerglass Festival in July and, in 2014, will do commissioned works for The National Ballet of Japan and the Kennedy Center, to be accompanied by the National Symphony Orchestra.

The new 15-minute work to be done at Jorgensen is a contemporary ballet piece for five dancers that includes pointe work, a score by Polish composer Jakub Ciupinski, and sets of corrugaTed White paper by molo, a design studio in Vancouver, Canada.

The other pieces on the program are Aria, a women's trio set to Handel; Among the Stars, a pas de deux en pointe with music by Ryuichi Sakamoto; The Calling, a solo and one of Lang's signature works, which employs a flowing white skirt; and two collaborations with Japanese visual artist Shinichi Maruyama - White, a dance on film, and i.n.k., a 20-minute work that involves video projection of splashes of water and paint in slow motion, as a backdrop for an abstract work by seven dancers.

The nine dancers in the troupe have pedigrees from the best-known companies and degrees from Juilliard, SUNY Purchase College Conservatory of Dance, The Ailey School/Fordham University, and Marymount Manhattan College.

Jorgensen was named Best College/University Performing Arts Center in the Hartford Advocate Best of Hartford Readers' Poll for 2012 and 2013.

Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts is located at 2132 Hillside Road on the UConn campus in Storrs. Ticket prices are $37, $34 and $32, with some discounts, and $15 for youth 18 and under and non-UConn college students. For tickets and information, call the Box Office at 860.486.4226, Monday through Friday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., or order online at jorgensen.uconn.edu. Convenient, free parking is available across the street in the North Garage.

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