City-Wide Dance, Violinist, Liz Lerman on CFA Spring Slate

During the Center for the Arts season announcement on May 4, CFA Director Pamela Tatge introduced the 2005-06 season events.

The season opens with Middletown Dances! on September 10. In Collaboration with the City of Middletown and community groups, the CFA is planning a citywide dance festival. The event will culminate in a community dance on Wesleyan’s Andrus Field, with performances and workshops along Main Street.

“We want to take over College through Green Street,” says Tatge. “We want to have an explosion of dance here in Middletown.”

The Crowell Concert Series will offer seven performances next year, bringing a wide array of world-class musicians to the intimate setting of Crowell Concert Hall. On the list is FleytMuzik by the Klezmer Band, the American Brass Quintet, Bulgarian Bebop, Lionheart, Ernest Dawkins and the New Horizons Ensemble, SFSound and violinist Midori.

“The audience is going to love the a capella of Lionheart and the bebop with Bulgan influence,” Tatge says. “Once you enter into that type of music, you don’t want it to stop.”

The Breaking Ground Dance Series will include performances by David Dorfman Dance; Electric Haiku: Calm as Custard; DanceMasters Weekend and the world premiere by the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange. Choreographer Liz Lerman, who will join Wesleyan’s faculty next year as a visiting dance instructor, is a 2002 MacArthur Fellow and founded the company in 1976.

Through explosive dancing, personal stories, humor and a company of performers whose ages span six decades, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange stretches the expressive range of contemporary dance. She will participate in Middletown Dances! and premiere Ferocious Beauty: Genome at the Center for the Arts as the culmination of a year-long, interdisciplinary residency at Wesleyan.

Other activities will include workshops at the Green Street Arts Center and teaching week-long intensive programs, such as the Summer Dance Institute 2005.

“The Liz Lerman Dance Exchange is really the anchor of our program for next year,” Tatge says.

The Outside the Box Theater Series kicks off with The Neo-Futurists: Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. Other theatre performances and discussions will be announced later in the year.

Additional events of note include The Disasters of War: From Goya to Golub in the Ezra & Cecile Zilkha Gallery, the Navaratri Festival, Celebrating Don Quixote, Eiko & Koma: Cambodian Stories and the Green Street Arts Festival.

During CFA Days on June 28 through July 26 the Center for the Arts will feature Selected Songs of Charles Ives; Music, Nature and Silence; Making Basquiat, Broadway’s Best with Frank Mastrone, Folk Songs of Ireland, India and America. La Timba Loca, Alonzo King LINES Ballet, Wesleyan organist Ronald Ebrecht and the Jay Hoggard Quintet will be performing on campus, along with a reading from novelist and non-fiction writer Amy Bloom.

The Wesleyan-sponsored Green Street Arts Center will celebrate its one-year anniversary in 2006. Ricardo Morris, director of the Green Street Arts Center, said the center is already planning classes in radio broad casting, studio recording, videography comic strip arts and tap dance.

Courses include “Dance is Big: Art-making and Community Building,” “Words and Movement,” “Dance Intensive for Senior Adults.” Another course, “Dance Deep: An Intensive for Dancers, Writers, and Theatre Artists,” is a three-credit graduate course offered through Wesleyan’s Division of Continuing Studies.