| Currently-- We are in rehearsal for a free community performance at the Green Hill Center for NC Art on Friday, March 2 at 7:00 pm. Two dances from the repertory will be shown: Duality, a 2006 duet with music by Joe Morgan, and Quatre Femmes, a 1997 dance for four danced to accompaniment by Deep Forest. Both have been arranged for performance in the round, allowing viewers to walk around the space and see the dances from all four sides. This community collaboration with the Green Hill has been an annual event for over fifteen years. A very exciting element to this year's show is that many of the original dancers will be reprising their roles in these works-- Kelly Swindell, Virginia Dupont and Laura McDuffee in Quatre Femmes, and Virginia Dupont and Amanda Smith in Duality.
A little recent history-- We premiered Time, for five women on December 2 and 3 in the UNCG Dance Theater. On December 5 we showed the same dance and the new Variation on Air for the G String in the Recital Hall in the School of Music, accompanied by the UNCG String Orchestra. Earlier this fall, we presented a joint performance with UNCG colleague, John Gamble, and we invited works by two guest choreographers, Sherone Price, a dance faculty member at Appalachian State University, and Carol Finley, Director of Dance at Meredith College. The concerts took place on October 20-22 in the UNCG Dance Theater.
I stepped down after five years as Head of the Dance Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in June, and I'm teaching at UNCG during the fall semester 2011.
Further back-- During the 2010-11 season, my dances were performed in Dance Charlotte!, at the Green Hill Center for NC Art in Greensboro, on the Faculty Concert at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC, and by the Moving Collective in Louisville, KY, in addition to touring with the NC Dance Festival's 20th Anniversary Season. I delivered a keynote speech at the September 2010 North Carolina Dance Alliance Annual Event at Elon University, and took part in a panel discussion on curricular trends and strategic planning at the university level at the National Association for Schools of Dance conference in Tucson, also in September.
Bio-- Van Dyke has been making dances for over 40 years and has shown choreography widely throughout the United States and in Europe, including Italy, the UK, and Portugal. She spent October and November 2000 teaching at the Western Australia Academy of the Performing Arts in Perth. She has set dances on a variety of groups ranging from the Washington Ballet to students at Baltimore's Carver Center for Arts and Technology. Her choreography, known for dynamic energy and rhythmic precision. seems to live within its musical form, bringing both the movement and the music to a new plane. Her dances are highly structured and meticulously crafted while the movement vocabulary is quick, vigorous and driving. THE WASHINGTON POST has described her use of form as "...immaculate. Thematic variation and recapitulation, counterpoint and consonance occur so naturally that one is hardly aware of the strict structure until the end." DANCE MAGAZINE has written "Van Dyke builds intense anticipation and escalating climax through interwoven designs of rhythmic movement and variations in timing, ending each work powerfully on a single image of finality." She is on the dance faculty at UNC Greensboro, a recipient of a NC Choreography Fellowship, and a 1993 Fulbright Scholar. In 2001, she was honored with the North Carolina Dance Alliance Annual Award for contributions to the development of dance in the state. An acclaimed teacher, DANCE TEACHER MAGAZINE recently gave her the 2008 Dance Teacher Award for Higher Education. In 2010, UNCG honored her with the Gladys Strawn Bullard Award for leadership and service.
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| Last Updated on Thursday, 26 January 2012 14:16 |
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Written by Webmaster
Saturday, 19 June 2010 02:18