Spanish Company Performs Three Dances by Famed Choreographer Nacho Duato
February 13, 2008
Spain's Compañía Nacional de Danza, which displayed Artistic Director Nacho Duato's choreographic genius in a November 2002 appearance at Penn State, returns to Eisenhower Auditorium for a performance at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 4.
State College is one of only four North American locations the company, which infrequently crosses the Atlantic, is scheduled to visit on this tour, which also takes the company to San Francisco, Seattle and Montreal.
Tickets for the Center for the Performing Arts event are $39 for an adult, $21 for a University Park student and $30 for a person 18 and younger. Buy tickets online at www.cpa.psu.edu or by phone at 814-863-0255. Outside the local calling area, dial 1-800-ARTS-TIX. Tickets are also available at four State College locations: Eisenhower Auditorium (8 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays), Penn State Tickets Downtown (10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday), Bryce Jordan Center (10 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays) and HUB-Robeson Center (11 a.m. to 2 p.m. weekdays).
Since 1990, Duato has fashioned his company, through commissioned works and his own choreography, into a ballet troupe with a bold and beautiful contemporary vision. Duato, one of the most celebrated choreographers in the world, created each of the three dances on the Penn State program.
Gilded Goldbergs, a 2006 work making its U.S. premiere on this tour, features British composer Robin Holloway's breakneck adaptation of Bach's Goldberg Variations. The dance is a high-speed kinetic dialogue between dancers and music.
"Discovering Robin Holloway's adaptation of the Goldberg Variations allowed me to get past what I had always considered as the untouchable character of Bach's original," Duato says. "I finally managed to approach the written music, to work with it and thus create this performance. In any event, as I have made clear in this piece of work, adapting a masterpiece such as this might be taken as a synonym of murder, and yet it also could represent its rebirth. The work takes on a new life, a whole new dimension. What Holloway does so well is to show his courage by placing creative freedom above and beyond the burden of history."
The songs, dances and rituals of Moroccan mystical brotherhoods that originated in sub-Saharan Africa inspired Gnawa, a 2005 dance originally choreographed for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. The sensual dance, set to music from Spain and North Africa, evokes the landscapes and people of the Mediterranean.
Por Vos Muero, a revival of a work created in 1996, offers tribute to the role dance played in Spanish culture in the 15th and 16th centuries. It employs period music and the spoken words of Garcilaso de la Vega, a Spanish poet-soldier influential in helping to introduce Italian Renaissance verse forms and poetic techniques to Spain.
KTH Architects, Inc. sponsors the presentation. WPSU-FM is the media sponsor. Artistic Viewpoints, an informal moderated discussion scheduled to feature Duato, is offered in Eisenhower Auditorium one hour before the performance and is free for ticket holders. Artistic Viewpoints regularly fills to capacity. Seating is available on a first-arrival basis. Audio description, which is especially helpful to patrons with sight loss, is available this performance at no extra charge to ticket holders. A grant from the Penn State Student Activities Fee Funds makes University Park student prices possible.
Contact: Laura Sullivan, 814-863-6379