Axis Dance Company celebrates its 20th Anniversary Home Season

From an Axis Dance Company press release:

OAKLAND, Claif. — AXIS Dance Company, renowned for creating and presenting cutting-edge, contemporary dance by dancers with and without disabilities, presents its 20th Anniversary Home Season at the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts in downtown Oakland November 14-16, 2008.

Audiences can expect a thrilling evening of breathtaking dance and bold ideas as AXIS teams up with four extraordinary choreographers who have created new and recent work specifically for AXIS’ unique company. The program features two world premieres: Vessel, a multi-media work choreographed by Artistic Director of The Foundry and former Lines Ballet dancer Alex Ketley, and A Room with No View, an up tempo, exhilarating quartet by Sonya Delwaide. Also on the program is the Bay Area premiere of Foregone choreographed by up-and-coming choreographer Kate Weare, and an audience favorite from 2007, the beauty that was mine, through the middle, without stopping, choreographed by local and national treasure Joe Goode.

Dance aficionados will certainly not want to miss the highly anticipated world premiere of Vessel, a multi-media performance work that includes text by poet Carol Snow and choreography by Alex Ketley. This is AXIS’ first collaboration with Ketley. Artistic Director Judith Smith says of the collaboration, “We’re intentionally focusing on the Bay Area and the great artistic resources that are here as we celebrate our 20th anniversary. AXIS is thrilled to be creating this multimedia project with Alex Ketley and Carol Snow. Working with film, text and language is new, exciting territory for AXIS.” Ketley too is charged by the challenge of working with AXIS.

“Not having worked extensively with dancers with disabilities, this project with AXIS is exciting to me. It will be about working within a new movement and performance landscape. I feel AXIS is a company steeped in a weight, significance, passion and sense of importance that is very unique.” Ketley describes Vessel as a “multi-media performance work involving dance, text, and video that will explore the concept that all aspects of our body, each and every cell, retain our memories.”

Poet Carol Snow brings her considerable talent to this new work as well. Her first collection of poems, Artist and Model, was selected by Robert Hass for the National Poetry Series in 1990 and also received the Poetry Center Book Award. Her second book, For, helped inaugurate the New California Poetry series from the University of California Press. In 2005, Snow collaborated with Alex Ketley to compose and perform Syntax: A Reading, Danced, a forty-minute text for two dancers.

Also on the AXIS program is audience favorite, the beauty that was mine, through the middle, without stopping choreographed by Joe Goode. With his signature theatrical style of dance making, Goode explores the following questions through his work: What do we see? Is the actuality of the “seen” entity ever close to what we presume it to be? Is “seeing” somehow limited? Does it imply an unnecessary separation between viewer and viewed? With project and tour support from the National Dance Project, AXIS toured the beauty that was mine, through the middle, without stopping to twelve cities throughout the U.S. before premiering it to enthusiastic local audiences at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in May 2008.

For their 20th Anniversary, AXIS will also premiere A Room with No View, an energetic quartet comprised of dancers Alice Sheppard and Rodney Bell using manual wheelchairs and non-disabled dancers Sonsherée Giles and Janet Das. A Room with No View is accompanied by the eclectic, up-beat rhythms of the musical sensation Uakti and the creative music stylings of composer Jerry Smith. Delwaide says, “I simply thought of four walls, four people and an array of sounds in creating this work.” A Room with No View is sure to take audiences on a kinesthetic ride. This is Delwaide’s fifth collaboration with AXIS, and so she comes ready with the choreographic tools necessary to push the boundaries of what these dancers can do.

The New York Times says of budding choreographer Kate Weare, who hails from both New York and San Francisco, "…(her) dances are so smart and so well executed and full of stimulating invitations for thought…” Foregone, her recent creation for AXIS, will have its Bay Area premiere as part of the 20th Anniversary Home Season. Weare says of the piece, “Foregone is a dance about loving - how painful, raucous and foolish it can be, and how we go on doing it no matter what.”