Buglisi/Foreman Dance

Modern American Masters Season 2000
Keepers of the Spirit

When:	May 4th - 7th (Thursday - Saturday at 8pm; Sunday at 3pm)
Where:	John Jay Theatre Lincoln Center Area 899 Tenth Avenue at 59th Street
Dancers:	Jacqulyn Buglisi, Terese Capucilli, Christine Dakin, Donlin Foreman, Kevin Predmore, Stephen Pier, Virgini Mecene, Miki Orihara, Elizabeth Roxas, Jennifer DePalo, Rika Okamoto, Jennifer Emerson, Adam Hougland, Nancy Turano
Guest:	Claire Bloom
Musicians:	Concert pianist Brian Zeger Cellist Crispin Campbell, The Interlochen Trio Composer/Musician Daniel Roumain
Production Stage Manager:	Maxine Glorsky
Lighting Design:	Jack Mehler, Clifton Taylor
Set Design:	Debora Mache, Deirdre Swords

About the Program:

Premiering this season is Donlin Foreman's Gilgamesh Project. Inspired by the Gilgamesh Epic, Mr. Foreman is developing a suite of three initially separate dances, with music by different composers in contrasting styles. The theme of man's mortality invades the dances of the Gilgamesh Project and draws them together.

The first dance is a solo to an improvisation on Miles Davis' In a Silent Way by Interlochen Trio cellist Crispin Campbell accompanied by Daniel Roumain on violin. Performed live at the Interlochen Arts Festival and DRA this past year, this work expresses the great sorrow Mr. Foreman has felt over the loss of friends and colleagues to AIDS. The second dance, choreographed for this season, is a quartet for men (Stephen Pier, Kevin Predmore, Adam Hougland and Mr. Foreman) with women moving through the opening and closing moments. It is inspired by a solitary and haunting score for piano and voice by the composer, singer and pianist Andy Monroe. The third dance, entitled Slow Danceis for four couples and moves more deeply into feelings of love and loss with the most wonderfully passionate slow dancing music imaginable - a song by Josh Haden titled Spiritual played and recorded by Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny. Using the movement vocabulary established in the other dances, and adding intricate partnering and group unison movement, this dance reveals man's true legacy, his capacity to rise above mortality through his ability to love.

The Haden and Metheny dance was commissioned by Martine van Hamel and will be danced by American Ballet Theatre company members at the Kaatsbaan International Dance Center this July. Buglisi/Foreman company members will perform this new work during this season.

Jacqulyn Buglisi will premier her Suspended Women, inspired by the writings of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, one of the finest Hispanic poets of the 17th century, acclaimed in her time as "Phoenix of Mexico, America's Tenth Muse." This new work involved 12 women and 4 men and the terrible beauty that is seen in their surrendered falling and rising. This dance explores the places in this world that are neither here nor there, neither up nor down, neither real nor imaginary. They are the in between places (thresholds) difficult to find and challenging to sustain. Yet they are the most fruitful places of all. For in these liminal narrows, a kind of life (suspended) takes place that is out of the ordinary, creative, and genuinely magical. Suspended Women will be danced to composer Daniel Roumain's arrangement of Ravel's Concerto for Piano in G major, with interpolations on the score composed and played by Roumain. Featured dancers are Terese Capucilli, Christine Dakin, Elizabeth Roxas, Miki Orihara, Rika Okamoto, Virginie Mecene and Nancy Turano. Ms. Buglisi uses this dance as a vehicle to speak out against violence and supression;

The programs will be completed by Buglisi's Red Hills, a solo inspired by the Alfred Steiglitz portraits of Georgia O'Keeffe and by letters written by the artist herself. Danced by Christine Dakin and Jennifer DePalo; and From Pent-up, Aching Rivers, influenced by the wrtings of the same title by Walt Whitman and the painting "Night" by Ferdinand Holder. The voice of Claire Bloom will be heard reading the poetry of Walt Whitman on the 4th and 7th and live on the 5th and 6th with principal artists Miki Orihara and Stephen Pier.