Clairobscur Dance Comes to The Nate Holden Performing Arts Center

With extraordinary dancers and eloquent choreography, Los Angeles based, Clairobscur Dance presents a full evening of works, choreographed by Artistic Director and Resident Choreographer Laurie Sefton, at the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center. The evening will feature the world premiere of Imminent Drift, along with Supremacy Ride and Triptych: Experience in Defiance.

Clairobscur Dance is known for dense and detailed movements. Resident choreographer and Artistic Director Laurie Sefton's award winning choreography is personal, emotion, and issue-based. Dance has the power to be an action of change. It acts as a lens, magnifying concepts through abstraction and physicality, translating intangible ideas into movement. Choreography decodes emotional content and viscerally affects those who experience it.

Imminent Drift was inspired by those immigrants whose home countries are destroyed or closed. Ms. Sefton was motived to draw close connections between the Syrian refugees and her Cuban/American heritage. Feeling that descendants of current refugees may not be able to return to their homeland, much like she has not been able to go to Cuba. This work's roots began as an exploration of that loss of cultural heritage. In the process creating the choreography as the music was being composed, the music greatly influenced the creation of the choreography, and over time the work has expanded to include themes of journey and finding home. Finding home is in fact, what most Americans and their ancestors have done. Found or made a home in the U.S.

Clairobscur Dance prides itself on its collaborations with many of its works set to original accompaniment. This year's world premiere Imminent Drift was created to an original score by two composers: Bryan Curt Kostors and Victoria Vasta. Ms. Sefton worked with each composer independently on the concept and then had Mr. Kostors bring the two works together to create the completed score.

Supremacy Ride (set to Gorecki's QUASI UNA FANTASIA, Movements I, II & III) was inspired by the 2016 election, rhetoric and gestures of the 45th president of the United States and other world leaders. Created to reflect not only the physical gestures of this president, but how the crushing invasion of politics in the media have put Americans on a unintended trek of daily frustration, fear, anger and hope. Ms. Sefton considered gestures from world leaders/past and present, as well as the 45th U.S. President to create a visceral

tirade full of meaning an innuendo. This work delves into the physicality and possible meaning of these gestures - expanded, contracted, and how they make the mover and recipient of the movements feel and respond. More than that, the work examines the struggle of coping with the new normal of daily upheaval and fear.

Laurie Sefton's work with Hip Hop poet/spoken word artist Jason Chu began in 2016 with dances set to Jason's previously composed works freedom and The New Word for Immigrant. These works formed foundation for their deeper collaboration, shortly after the 2016 presidential election and manifested as their collaboration A Billion Brilliant Bits. We present these three works in a collection entitled Triptych: Experience in Defiance in which Jason takes a personal tone echoing his thoughts about freedom, immigration and humanity's struggle to stay engaged. Crafted as solo, duet and trio and accompanied by Jason live on stage, Ms. Sefton brings her gifts of detail and emotion to his intelligent poetry.

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