Amanda Byars, Bridget Roosa, Laurel Zahrobsky, and Amanda Exley Lower announce a collaborative choreographic effort titled Thread.   We are all four choreographers, dancers, and teachers joining forces to present a series of performances that lift up the voices of women expressed through dance in Atlanta, GA at the Performing Arts Studio on the campus of Emory University.  Performances are both at 8pm on Friday February 8th and Saturday February 9th.  Tickets are available through the website www.threaddance.org.

Each artist will offer her own unique movement research through solo, duet, and group dances.  Highlights will include the culmination of Bridget Roosa’s research into the Labanotation reconstruction of The Beloved by Lester Horton.  Joined by Lonnie Davis, on faculty at DeKalb School of the Arts, the pair powerfully retell Lester Horton’s 1948 classic.

“The Beloved is a dark dance filled with repetitive and unsettling pedestrian movement. The music sets the eerie undertone for the dance with it’s combination of deep and sharp chords. There are two dancers, a man and a woman. The dancers are in gendered garb, and the man clearly feels superior to the woman by the way he chooses to interact with her. He performs movements that denote physical abuse such as hitting, choking, and pulling her arm, and seems to constantly be at her side in a manner that would suggest him being controlling or suspicious.” (www.lesterhortonwebsite.wordpresscom)

The Beloved is a historical treasure for students and modern audiences alike.  This work stands in interesting contrast to works from the contemporary choreographers.  Students of modern dance will enjoy the comparisons of shape, weight, flow, and music of the older work and the current day dances.  The choreographers will remain after the performance on Friday for a Q and A led by Lori Teague of Emory University.