(NORTH ADAMS, Mass.) – Working with an all-star team of dancers and designers, choreographer Beth Gill will present a work-in-progress performance of New Work for the Desert in the Hunter Center at MASS MoCA, where she has been developing the piece while in residence, on Saturday, January 18, 2014, at 8pm. Presented in association with Vermont Performance Lab, as part of the Hatchery Project, the showing will feature technical and choreographic elements achieved during Gill’s residency.
Named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2012, Gill won the first annual Juried Bessie Award and “Outstanding Emerging Choreographer “in 2011. To develop New Work for the Desert, she is collaborating with performers Christiana Axelson, Jennifer Lafferty, Heather Lang, Marilyn Maywald, Kayvon Pourazar, and Stuart Singer, and lighting designer Thomas Dunn. Within the piece, the body struggles through form, gesture, and contact to express something real and fictitious, old and new, foreign and familiar.
“I am fixated on notions of space and perception and different forms of materiality affecting our experience of space,” Gill says. “At the onset of every new work is a familiar battle to reconnect with why I keep making dances. The only way this continues to be a relevant language, medium, and identity for me is if I’m questioning its necessity at every juncture.”
A full bar, and dinner and snacks from Lickety Split, are available before and during the show. Tickets are $15, $10 for students. Members receive a 10% discount. Tickets are available through the MASS MoCA box office, located on Marshall Street in North Adams, from 11am to 5pm (open every day except Tuesdays). Tickets can also be charged by phone by calling 413.662.2111 x1 during box office hours or purchased online at MASS MoCA.
The performance is presented by MASS MoCA in association with Vermont Performance Lab as part of The Hatchery Project, with lead funding support by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and additional funding by the National Endowment for the Arts.