'Rites of Seasons,' the spring dance concert, will be performed at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, March 5-7, and at 2 p.m. Sunday, March 8. Tickets are $15 or free with an Elon ID; call 336-278-5610 for more information.
A seamless conceptual modern dance production and collaboration by four choreographers and nearly 40 dancers.
Visually stunning, eco-friendly stage and costume designs created by a team of faculty and students.
A dazzling original score composed by an Elon faculty member and performed by music majors.
When “Rites of Seasons” premieres Thursday, March 5, it will be the most ambitious dance performance yet produced by Elon’s Department of Performing Arts. The program is the culmination of three years of preparation, two years of research, and an intensive cross-disciplinary collaboration in Elon’s arts programs.
That collaboration expanded students’ abilities and offered new ways to approach performance.
“I’ve never done anything like this,” Julia Towner ’21 said Monday night, looking out from a raised platform onstage during dress rehearsals. The lit platform places the musicians above the dancers behind a thin gauze. Along with fellow vocal performance major Alexa Lugo ’22, Towner is responsible for complex choruses of wordless sounds during portions of the electronic score. “This isn’t classical music, and it’s interesting to work in other genres beyond classical.”
Likewise, dancers said it was the first time they’d worked with live musicians to create a theatrical experience.
“Such big part of this concert is collaboration with other disciplines, and I really appreciate that,” said Katie Fulks ’22 at a dress rehearsal earlier this week. “We always work with costume designers and lighting, and they knocked it out of the park with this, but we added the orchestra and had music composed for this and it’s incredible. I love that collaboration across disciplines.”
That fluid exchange of ideas and experiences is what Artistic Director Lauren Kearns intended when she conceived of the project several years ago.
The professor of dance and chair of the Performing Arts Department wanted to expand upon an homage to Igor Stravinsky’s ballet “The Rite of Spring” to incorporate the four seasons and speak to issues of climate change. She applied for and received an Elon College, the College of Arts and Sciences, Fund for Excellence grant to create an original, fully realized experience for audiences.
She assembled a team of artists to begin researching weather patterns, artistic movements, clothing design and theater technology to pull it together.
Kearns choreographed “Spring,” Assistant Professors of Dance Renay Aumiller and Casey Avaunt choreographed “Fall” and “Summer,” respectively, and guest professor Yoshito Sakurab choreographed “Winter.”
Meg Boericke ’20 dances in “Spring,” “Fall,” and “Winter.” She appreciated the different ways each choreographer approached their season, allowing dancers to bring their own movements and interpretations to the stage while creating a unified performance.
“Most inspiring for me is the idea that I also have a big hand in telling the story from start to finish,” Boericke said. “Being able to both show the story line the choreographer is seeing but also express that story in my own way is exciting.”
Clay Stevenson, senior lecturer in music, composed the 53-minute, mostly electronic score. He filled the arrangements with tribal rhythms, burbling melodies and menace just beneath the surface to underscore the realization that our seasons and weather patterns are changing as seas rise.
Four musicians accompany Stevenson’s score on stage. In addition to vocalists Lugo and Towner, Hannah Strickland ’21 plays extended violin solos throughout “Spring” and Jeff Leu ’20 plays hip-hop inflected synthesizer and keyboards during “Summer.”
In tandem with students, production designers and technical crews worked to produce a show with as minimal a carbon footprint as possible. Eighty-five percent of the set was built using recycled materials from previous performances. The production makes extensive use of LED lighting, which uses less energy than traditional bulbs. Designer Heidi Jo Schiemer’s costumes were fashioned from natural fibers wherever possible, and designers used fiber-reactive dyes that didn’t need heat drying.
Assistant Professor of Performing Arts Charles Johnson studied modern art to create a set to showcase the dancers and musicians. He and Schiemer collaborated on costumes that are literally parts of the staging during some movements.
“Everything in the show was designed to have multiple uses,” Johnson said, pointing out that Elon Theatrical Design and Technology majors made it happen. During several rehearsals, Johnson and stage crew members sat separating and fluffing each of the 6,000 leaves that float to the stage during “Fall.”
Johnson said the Fund for Excellence grant allowed the team “greater creative freedom to experiment with things we otherwise may not have been able to do.”
Bill Webb and TDT majors worked “hand-in-hand” to rig the set and build the system of LED lights that accent the stage.
“It’s a lot of problem solving,” Webb, associate professor of performing arts and production manager for the Performing Arts, said. “You have to figure out where to run the cables, how to run them, and because you’re hanging boxes (on stage) that means some of the lights won’t work. The students did all the rigging, hanging, focusing the lights.”
Kearns hopes audiences appreciate “Rites of Seasons” and leave with a greater appreciation for the arts and the well-being of the planet.
“It has been a personal highlight of my Elon career to work on Rites of Seasons with my talented dance, design, and music colleagues and our equally gifted student artists and technicians,” Kearns said. “It is my hope that this level of collaboration continues to transcend our entire artistic community at Elon.”
She expects “Rites of Seasons” will be the first of regular evening-length theatrical dance programs the department produces.
