(Princeton, NJ) --  The Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Dance at Princeton University announced the professional choreographers whose work will be performed at the annual Princeton Dance Festival, an event that will move from its traditional February presentation to December 4 through 6, 2015. Princeton students will perform repertory works by Trisha Brown and Bill T. Jones, along with new works by Loni Landon, Dean Moss, Jimena Paz, and Brian Reeder.

 

"Masterworks by Trisha Brown and Bill T. Jones will frame this exciting collection of new dances by contemporary choreographers,” notes Susan Marshall, Director of the Program in Dance.  “The program will present a thought-provoking range of movement techniques and artistic thought."

 

Guest artists Eva Karczag and Vicky Shick, former members of Trisha Brown Dance Company and original cast members of Brown’s Set and Reset, will stage Set and Reset/Reset. Set and Reset is a 1983 seminal work by Brown, the first woman choreographer to receive the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship “Genius Award,” with music by Laurie Anderson. This new interpretation for Princeton students provides a unique opportunity for students to learn the original choreographic directives used by Brown and be guided through improvisations to create a new, original end result. The performance will feature sets and costumes inspired by the original designs of Robert Rauschenberg.

 

Stuart Singer will re-stage Jones’ Continuous Replay, an audience favorite at Princeton’s 2011 dance festival. Continuous Replay, a major postmodern work by Arnie Zane, was restaged in 1982 with additional material by Jones, a 2010 Kennedy Center Honors Recipient and internationally acclaimed director and choreographer, who received Tony Awards for his choreography for FELA! in 2010 and Spring Awakening in 2007.

 

The Festival will also premiere four new works by choreographers who will serve as guest faculty or guest choreographers during the fall semester. Loni Landon, award-winning dancer, choreographer, and movement consultant based in New York City, will collaborate with students in the making of a new dance. In addition to creating dances for her own collective, Loni Landon Dance Projects, her work has been commissioned by The Juilliard School, Ballet X and numerous dance companies across the country. Landon, along with Gregory Dolbashian, founded The Playground, a new initiative designed to give emerging choreographers a place to experiment. 

Dean Moss will re-conceive a dance based on the board dance duet from his larger work, johnbrown, to shape a new work with video material created by the student cast members. Moss is a dance-based multidisciplinary theater and video artist, curator, and lecturer who investigates perceptions of self and other, often incorporating transcultural performance collaborations and audience participation. He is the recipient of the inaugural Doris Duke Impact Award in Theater, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Artists Grant, and a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for his work Spooky Action at a Distance.

Jimena Paz will create a new work for her students based on a previously created piece. She has worked as a dancer with numerous artists including Vicky Shick, Lance Gries, Susan Rethorst, the Stephen Petronio Company, Constanza Macras (Germany), Iris Scaccheri (Argentina), Burt Barr, Virginie Yassef (France), Antonio Ramos, and Jonah Bokaer, among others. During the past decade her choreography has been produced in New York and in dance festivals.

 

Brian Reeder will create a new ballet work. Reeder’s choreography has been performed at American Ballet Theatre, ABT Studio Company, Washington Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Colorado Ballet, Sacramento Ballet, and other regional dance companies. As a dancer, Reeder performed with New York City Ballet, Ballet Frankfurt, and American Ballet Theater.

 

Princeton’s dance festival has been held during the spring semester in recent years. “We decided to move the Festival to the end of the fall semester for a number of reasons,” notes Marshall.  “There is an exciting momentum that these courses and rehearsals build over the course of the fall semester, a momentum that can dip over holiday break. Bridging vacation and overlapping with the demands of the new semester presents challenges. With a December concert, the energy that builds throughout September, October and November reaches a natural crescendo by semester’s end.”

 

Festival performances will be Friday, December 4 at 8:00 p.m., Saturday December 5 at 2:00 and 8:00 p.m., and Sunday, December 6 at 1:00 p.m. Tickets will go on sale in October.

In addition to the Festival, the Program in Dance will present a March concert showcasing seniors in the program with the premiere of senior thesis choreography and the performance of repertory works. In spring the Performance Lab offers an informal showing of new student work.  The Choreographers in Residence project will provide audiences an opportunity to see and hear about work being created by professional choreographers Dean Moss; Beth Gill, a 2015-16 Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center; and Pavel Zustiak, a 2015-2016 Princeton Arts Fellow. Dance Master Classes will be open to the public to observe, along with end-of-semester showings of work created and learned during the fall and spring semesters from a range of classes including ballet, modern, African dance, urban dance, and courses that present interdisciplinary explorations of dance with other areas.

 

To learn more about the Princeton Dance Festival, the Program in Dance, and the more than 100 other events presented each year by the Lewis Center for the Arts visit: arts.princeton.edu.