The Bang Group Curates: Sara Hook, Roxane D’Orléans Juste and David Parker
Company:
The Bang Group
Sara Hook and David Parker join forces to present a program of vigorous purposeful dancing leavened by their characteristic gimlet-eyed wit.
Guest artist Roxane D'Orleans Juste, a much-lauded alum of the NYC dance community, will also present her solo l'Equivoque which grapples with bias and assumptions.
The Bang Group will tap dance while stuck together in Velcro suits and essay a queer romance set to songs from MGM musicals.
Hook and Parker's latest collaboration, Re-Accounting, takes place at the junction of Cecchetti ballet, sixties social dancing and wistfully deconstructed self-care movement.
Rachel Rizzuto will bust into her own storehouse of physical prowess in Hook's Yegg and, Mozart's Turkish March will be conjured through voice and taps in Parker's Song and Dance.
Glorious dancing, dangerous rhythm and soulful revelation can be found here.
SARA HOOK is a performer, choreographer and educator whose diverse performing career includes touring the world with Nikolais Dance Theater, dancing for Martha Graham luminaries Pearl Lang and Jean Erdman, and being a frequent guest artist/collaborator with David Parker and the Bang Group. Her choreography has been produced in numerous New York City venues including Dance Theater Workshop-now NYLA, Danspace, Dixon Place, Symphony Space, DanceNowNYC’s Series at Joe’s Pub of the Public Theater and in venues across 25 American states, in the Netherlands, Canada, Italy, Ecuador, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. Both her work and teaching focus on questions about dance history, personal expression and identity, and the role of somatic exploration in meaning-making. Hook holds a BFA from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, an MFA from New York University, and a certification as a movement analyst from the Laban Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies. She has toured widely as a guest artist and been an adjudicator for numerous American College Dance Conferences. She has taught at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center, Princeton University, Paul Taylor Dance Company Summer Intensives, and the Bates Dance Festival. Currently she is Professor and Head of the Department of Dance at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.
ROXANE D’ORLÉANS JUSTE is a Haitian-Canadian dancer, teacher, and choreographer. She is the choreographer in residence for the Fundación Contemporeaña Corearte in Caracas, Venezuela, and serves as co-chair of its Executive board. She is the creator of “En Solo” dance concerts, a collaborative platform for her own repertory and the rarely seen signature works of modern classic and contemporary choreographers, presented in prestigious national and international venues. For over three decades, she toured and taught worldwide as a leading member of the Eleo Pomare Dance Company, the Annabelle Gamson Dance Solos, and the José Limón Dance Company where she currently serves as a reconstructor and which she formerly led as Artistic Associate and Associate Artistic Director. Roxane was featured and originated roles in the works of master choreographers: Anna Sokolow, Anthony Tudor, Lar Lubovitch, Mark Haim, Jiri Kylian, Murray Louis, Ralph Lemon, Donald McKayle, Eleo Pomare, Clay Taliaferro, George Faison, and Dianne McIntyre among others. She has taught at the Rotterdam Tanzakademie, The Palucca Hochschule Fȕr Tanz in Dresden, the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, Germany and the Tanztheater Wuppertal /Pina Bausch Dance Company in Germany and on tour in Paris and in New York City. She is a Bessie-award winner for “Outstanding Sustained Achievement” in dance and was honored with Canada’s prestigious dance award “Le Prix Jacqueline Lemieux. D’Orléans Juste is currently Associate Professor of Dance at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Choreographer DAVID PARKER is a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow who founded The Bang Group in 1995 with dancer Jeffrey Kazin. Parker's work is dedicated to creative liberty, aesthetic diversity, and craftsmanship. He has created over 50 works for ballet and contemporary companies, universities, festivals and soloists as well as the bulk of the repertory for The Bang Group. Parker has also served on the faculties of The Juilliard School, The Alvin Ailey School, Barnard College, SUNY Purchase, Princeton University, Marymount Manhattan College and Hunter College. Among his best-loved works are Nut/Cracked--a comic/subversive, neo-vaudeville version of The Nutcracker now in its 21st season--and a series of experimental percussive dances which limn intimate relationships. Parker's genre-non-conforming works have toured widely throughout Europe and North America and he is currently curating and presenting the work of a range of dancemakers through Arts On Site and DANCE NOW Boston.
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