American Dance Festival Enters Final Week with Kyle Abraham's A.I.M and More

By: Jul. 03, 2018
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The American Dance Festival's (ADF) final week of the 2018 season features the return of Kyle Abraham's A.I.M in the evening-length work Dearest Home July 17-19. The ADF performance series and ADF's Summer Dance Intensive merge in the exciting Footprints program presenting three ADF-commissioned dances by Dafi Altabeb, Jillian Peña, and Abby Zbikowski July 20-21.

Kyle Abraham'S A.I.M

Presented in Association with The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University

von der Heyden Studio Theater at the Rubenstein Arts Center

Tuesday, July 17 | 8:00pm

Wednesday, July 18 | 2:00pm & 8:00pm

Thursday, July 19 | 8:00pm

A.I.M, under the artistic direction of Kyle Abraham, creates evocative, interdisciplinary works. Born into hip-hop culture in the late 1970s and grounded in artistic upbringing in classical cello, piano, and the visual arts, Abraham's goal is to delve into identity in relation to a personal history. A.I.M is a representation of dancers from various disciplines and diverse personal backgrounds. Combined together, these individualities create movement that is manipulated and molded into something fresh and unique. The company brings Dearest Home, an interactive dance work focused on love, longing, and loss, comprised primarily of solos and duets in conversation and collaboration with a variety of age groups and self-identified subcultures. The work interweaves movement in its most vulnerable and intimate state with cross-cultural conversation and community action. This performance contains nudity.

FOOTPRINTS

Reynolds Industries Theater

Friday, July 20 | 8:00pm

Saturday, July 21 | 7:00pm

ADF Commissioned World Premieres! | ADF Debuts!

Footprints delivers an outstanding presentation of three ADF-commissioned world premieres, performed with impeccable technique and infectious energy by ADF students. Dafi Altabeb, recipient of the 2012, 2013, and 2016 Excellence Award for young choreographers from the Israeli Ministry of Culture and the 2014 Rozenblum Award for Excellence from the Municipality of Tel-Aviv, returns to ADF. Altabeb's work is tender, delicate, yet powerful. Her pieces project youth, courage, imagination, contradictions, and above all, honesty. 2017 "Bessie" award winning choreographer Abby Zbikowski, whose newly commissioned work with Dayton Contemporary Dance Company opened the ADF season, produces hyper physical dances. Eva Yaa Asantewaa, in a review of Zbikowski's duet double nickels on a dime, stated, "she brings the 'outside' influences of punk, hip-hop, and martial arts into the formal space of concert dance but not as fetishized artifact but as form, energy, and psyche embodied, in a matter-of-factly outrageous way." Jillian Peña's work seeks to make visible the confusion and desire of the self in relationship to itself and others. Her work is in dialogue with psychoanalysis, queer theory, pop media, and spirituality. She was the recipient of a 2016 "Bessie" award nomination for Emerging Choreographer in New York and was awarded the 2014 Prix Jardin d'Europe, the European Prize for Outstanding Emerging Choreography, at ImpulsTanz Dance Festival in Vienna.

Tickets for Reynolds Industries Theater and the Rubenstein Arts Center

americandancefestival.org

Duke University Box Office

919-684-4444

Bryan University Center

Duke University West Campus

Tuesday-Friday 11:00am-6:00pm

The Duke box office will open one hour prior to event time.

About ADF:

Throughout its 85-year history, ADF has been a nationally recognized leader in our indigenous art form of modern dance. Generations of dancers and choreographers have come to ADF as students, taught as faculty, and created and performed work as professional artists. Each summer, ADF has been the beating heart of the dance world. The best companies in the world premiere work on ADF's stage, much of it commissioned by the festival. Other festivals and season programs are measured against ADF. Over 25,000 people see performances by more than 30 companies each season. The festival has commissioned 427 works and premiered 689 pieces including dances by Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and Paul Taylor. Each summer at ADF, more than 300 students from some 25 countries and 42 states study with ADF's 50 faculty members. They come as kids in leotards with as many doubts as dreams. They leave as dancers and artists-and sometimes even new members of companies. Lives change in those 5½ sweaty weeks. Beyond the summer, ADF maintains year-round dance studios offering movement classes to over 650 participants, provides over 180 free classes to almost 4,000 local dancers, and offers choreographic residences providing artists with the necessary space and time to create. americandancefestival.org.

 


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