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Brown, Leichter, Zoe | Juniper & Dorfman Headline 2011 Bates Dance Festival

LEWISTON, ME: The Bates Dance Festival announces its 29th season of public events, taking place July 1 thru August 13 on the Bates College campus.  The 6-week festival showcases contemporary performance works by Camille A. Brown & Dancers, Nicholas Leichter Dance, Zoe | Juniper and David Dorfman Dance. These acclaimed companies will offer evenings rich in storytelling, virtuosity, passion and humor.  All told, the festival comprises performances, panel discussions and lectures by more than 40 internationally recognized dancers from across the United States and abroad. Performance times and locations appear below. For information about tickets and event locations and for additional performance details, visit www.batesdancefestival.org.

Opening the 2011 season is the vivid and versatile Camille A. Brown & Dancers, whose recent work has been performed by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Performances take place at 8 p.m. July 15 and 16, at Bates College's Schaeffer Theatre, 305 College St.  Brown's passionate dances tell stories of historical moments and ordinary lives through a mixture of contemporary and African dance styles. In every work by Brown, a potent message of empowerment reverberates from the stage. For their Maine debut, Brown & Dancers offer four works including "The Groove to Nobody's Business." Originally commissioned by Ailey, "Groove" reveals humorous glimpses of humanity through Brown's bold, quicksilver dancing that is charming to the max. Also on the program are "City of Rain," "New Second Line" and a heart-stopping new solo by Brown, a dynamo of a dancer. Recently featured in Dance Magazine as one of "25 to Watch," Brown has been honored with awards and fellowships that include a 2006 Princess Grace Award in Choreography (the first woman to receive this award), a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in choreography and the Presidential Scholarship in the Arts Award in dance.  She was a member of Ronald K. Brown/Evidence from 2001 to 2007 and has been a guest artist with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Brown has received commissions from the Ailey company and Ailey II, Hubbard Street 2, Urban Bush Women, Ballet Memphis and Philadanco.

Next up is the virtuosic Nicholas Leichter Dance, performing their newest work, "The Whiz" - an outlandish take on "The Wizard of Oz." Performances take place at 8 p.m. Thursday and Saturday, July 21 and 23, in Bates College's Schaeffer Theatre.  Founded in 1996, the New York City-based Leichter Dance has performed in more than 50 cities in 17 states and 12 countries at venues including The Joyce Theater; the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Howard Gilman Opera House with the Brooklyn Philharmonic; Central Park Summerstage; Reynolds Industries Theater at Duke University; the Fabuleus international theater festival in Belgium; the Jazz Dance World Congress in Taiwan; the Free Dance festival in Ukraine; Time to Dance in Latvia; and most recently at the Dialogue de Corps Festival at the Centre de Développement Chorégraphique La Termitière in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, by invitation of the U.S. State Department.

Two-time National Dance Project award winners Zoe | Juniper construct three-dimensional art that melds precise dance performance with evocative video and photographic techniques, juxtaposing restrained wildness and delicate fury. The Seattle-based team returns to Bates with "A Crack in Everything," a multidisciplinary performance combining Zoe Scofield's disciplined physical distortion of classical technique with Juniper Shuey's distilled visual design.  Performances take place at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, July 29 and 30, in Bates College's Schaeffer Theatre, 305 College St. "A Crack in Everything" uses "The Oresteia," the trilogy of ancient Greek tragedies, as a lens to understand the emotional spectrum of justice and retaliation.

Scofield studied ballet and choreography at Walnut Hill School of Arts and Boston Conservatory before joining Prometheus Dance and Bill James' Atlas Moves Watching Dance Projects. Her work has been shown at On the Boards, the Inside/Out stage at Jacob's Pillow, Seattle's Bumbershoot music and arts festival, Ten Tiny Dances, The Southern Theater, ODC Theater and Velocity Theater. Juniper Shuey is a sculptural-performance and video installation artist. His work has been featured in many exhibitions including solo shows at the Howard House, Tacoma Art Museum's Northwest Biennial (2004, 2006), Fashion is Art, Northwest Annual at Bellevue Art Museum, and "La Mostra" in Rome. In 2005, Scofield and Shuey began their collaboration with "I am nothing without you" for On the Boards' NWNW Festival. Their collaboration continued with "there aint no easy way out," "the devil you know is better then the devil you don't," "sin" and "Old girl."

David Dorfman Dance, a Bates festival favorite, returns with "Prophets of Funk - Dance to the Music," driven by the popular -- and populist - funk sounds of Sly and the Family Stone. Dorfman celebrates Sly's groundbreaking, visceral and powerful music of prophetic love, reminding us that in the face of the funk of life, hopes and aspirations still reside in all of us. Performances take place at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Aug. 5 and 6, in Bates College's Schaeffer Theatre. Since its founding in 1985, David Dorfman Dance has performed extensively in New York City and throughout the Americas, Great Britain and Europe, most recently in Russia and Poland. David Dorfman and the company's dancers and artistic collaborators have been honored with eight New York Dance and Performance ("Bessie") Awards. 

Showcasing diverse styles and perspectives, the festival's "Different Voices" concerts offer choreography by established and emerging artists from around the globe. Performances take place at 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, August 11 and 12, in Bates College's Schaeffer Theatre.  On the 2011 program are new works by Sunon Wachirawarakarn, a principal dancer with the Pichet Klunchun Dance Company in Thailand; Hsiu-Hsan Wang, a dancer with Taiwan's experimental Taipei Dance Forum; Nelisiwe Xaba, a Soweto-born multimedia artist; Kettly Noel, a Haitian-born, Malian-based choreographer whose work deals with women's issues in Africa; Jennifer Archibald, New York-based hip hop and jazz choreographer; and the gorgeous Connecticut-based modern troupe, RaceDance. Also represented are emerging choreographers Catherine Cabeen, artistic director of Catherine Cabeen and Company, a collaborative company based in Seattle; and contemporary Indian choreographer Aparna Sindhoor, co-director of Navarasa Dance Theater in Boston.

Along with the mainstage performances, the festival offers a variety of other events:

• The annual "Musician's Concert," a global mix of music by 10 remarkable composers and musicians, takes place at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 2, in the Franco-American Heritage Center, 46 Cedar St., Lewiston.
• "Inside Dance: Understanding Contemporary Dance" is a series of lectures and post-performance talks led by Boston dance writer Debra Cash. Offering insight into the artists and their work, the lectures precede the Nicholas Leichter Dance performance at 7:15 p.m. Saturday, July 23; the Zoe | Juniper performance at 7:15 p.m. Saturday, July 30; and the Dorfman Dance performance at 7:15 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 6. All lectures take place in Schaeffer Theatre. Post-performance talks follow most Friday evening performances.  
• The festival offers a selection of free and low-cost events. "Global Exchange: Sharing Across Cultures," a panel discussion with international visiting artists, takes place at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 28, in Pettigrew Hall, Room 301, 305 College St.

The "Festival Finale," featuring dancers of all ages and abilities performing modern, hip hop and contemporary works by Archibald, Dorfman, Leichter and Race, and also representing the festival's Youth Arts Program, takes place at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 13, in Alumni Gymnasium.