This coming weekend, the Mills Repertory Dance Company will be hosting In Flux, featuring four dance premieres, two organized by Mills Dance Department faculty members Kara Davis and Shinichi Iova-Koga, another by a guest choreographer, Risa Jaroslow, and the fourth, a Mills MiniEvent, by Holley Farmer.
The event will take place over three days: Thursday, Nov. 20, to Saturday, Nov. 22. The first two shows will take place in the Lisser Theater on the Mills College campus and the third will be held at the Oberlin Dance Collective Dance Commons in San Francisco.
Kara Davis joined the Mills College dance faculty this fall as a visiting assistant professor. Davis, who has been the recipient of the Isadora Duncan award twice, will put forth her new dance, Lapse.
“As Mills Repertory Dance Company’s new Artistic Director, Ms. Davis’ piece Lapse explores the body’s responses to states of liminality and the uncertainty of transitions,” according to the MRDC website.
Davis, who has performed with companies as various as Ballet Met, Atlanta Ballet, Ohio Ballet, the San Francisco Opera Ballet and Ballet Jorgen in Toronto, Ontario, has also been an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts and was a founding member of two dance companies: KUNST-STOFF and Janice Garrett & Dancers.
“Shinichi Iova-Kogas piece, x=sky, plays on internal and external architectures, where objects and bodies meet, merge and separate,” according to the Dance Department’s webpage.
Iova-Koga is the artistic director of the San Francisco based physical theatre and dance company, inkBoat, which he founded in 1998.In 2008, Iova-Koga was named one of the “25 to watch” by Dance Magazine, according to the inkBoat website. Iova-Koga is currently a visiting artist at Mills.
Risa Jaroslow will be bringing Sororis, a piece created for five women which “explores the nuances and complexities of multiple relationships,” the Dance Department’s webpage said.
Jaroslow, of Risa Jaroslow & Dancers, frequently attempts to blur the line between art and life in her work by incorporating people who aren’t members of the dancing community into her pieces, as she did by having a firefighter in “Resist/Surrender”.
The shows will also feature a Mills MiniEvent — an uninterrupted sequence of excerpts taken from Merce Cunningham’s orignal choreography. This MiniEvent will be restaged by Mills faculty member and former Merce Cunningham dancer, Holley Farmer.
“Collaborators on the Cunningham Trust-sanctioned project include composer Robert Lopez and long-time Cunningham Dance Company filmmaker Elliot Caplan,” according to the event press release.
For more information on the event, look to the Mills College Repertory Dance Company webpage.
