Saturday, November 17^th at 1pm & 3pm. FREE open to the public. Free on-site parking.

The performance, set against the backdrop of Zanele Muholi’s stunning exhibition Somnyama Ngonyama: Hail the Dark Lioness, features a new work by SDT Director and dance faculty member Kathleen Wessel as well as a re-staging of T. Lang’s 2008 masterwork JIG by original cast member Morgan Hawkins, C’2010. Following a semester of faculty mentorship and peer feedback, Thulani Vereen C’2020 and domestic exchange student Summer K. Thomas will unveil new group works. Aquilah Ohemeng, and Veronica Ramsey, both students in Professor Wessel’s Choreographic Process I class, will present solos they created in collaboration with Professor Sharan Strange’s Poetry Writing Workshop I class. The works include a new poem by Maghan Baptiste and a live poetry reading by Eliamani Ismail.

Vereen, a Computer Science major, is using the 3D printer and a programmable LED screen in Spelman’s Innovation Lab to create wearable gloves that project images onto the dancers’ palms. Part of her work, set to a live recording of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World,” features holographic globes the dancers can hold and manipulate as they move. Wessel’s work, which was inspired by research into lawsuits filed by female game show models on The Price is Right, often called “Barker’s Beauties,” explores themes of external show(wo)manship and internal unrest in connection to a perceived Spelman-centric concept of “perfection performed.”

About JIG: Puzzle-lovers will sit for hours in front of a box of hundreds of pieces. When separate, the pieces have no meaning. But the puzzler will not rest until all the edges, angular or smooth, fit in a way that makes sense and the larger picture is understood. JIG explores the puzzling effect of relationships; one cannot see at a glance whether an angle or a curve will match… but when they do, beauty is revealed. Through the juxtaposition of linear and curved movement (as well as energy, space, and time), JIG examines intimacy in all its brilliance and tragedy.

Photo credit: Alan Kimara Dixon