In continuation of a historic November in Roanoke, VA the 16th Annual Hollins Fall Dance Gathering will coincide with the 41st Annual Congress on Research in Dance…IN ROANOKE!

For the past 16 years, Hollins University Dance Department has consistently been presenting a 3-day run of dance performances including world renown dancers and choreographers, students and alumnae. Usually unbeknownst to our general population, ground breaking dancers, choreographers, lighting/technical designers and scholars have been traveling to Roanoke each fall, a combination of uber-talent performing socio-politics, ethnographies, corporealities, transgressive bodies, beautiful bodies, experimental zaniness, transformative experiences and more…right under our noses. The 2008 concert will focus particularly on showing new choreographic work addressing themes of global feminisms from an international cohort of emergent artists such as the Nu Dance Company from Shanghai. Please see the schedule below for theatre and performance times. Also, if you want to get in on the action, you can participate in the Open Contact Improvisation Jam after the November 14 performance, details below!

The cost to attend :: $7 (unbelievable)

Each year, Hollins grows it’s local audience beyond the campus borders as the brain drain in Roanoke is set in reverse to search out what was once relegated to larger metropolitan areas. As the recent opening of OUR NEW Taubman Museum of Art signals, Roanoke is and has been redefining it’s inner geography and retuning it’s pulse towards a dynamic-self.  This transformation is grounded in the proliferation of imagination and wonder through the relational strategies of the arts–this is happening! Hollins Dance Department has known this for quite some time, leading this charge is Donna Faye Burchfield who since 1993 has taken a program of Dance which was not even a major at the time to international recognition including now a BFA and an MFA degree in partnership with American Dance Festival. Wow!

If you have never attended a Hollins Fall Dance Gathering, I encourage you to go this year, for many reasons, one being that this year the 3-days of performances intersects with one of the largest gatherings in the world of Dance Scholars, CORD (Congress on Research in Dance). Founded in 1965, CORD is an international non-profit interdisciplinary society for dance researchers. CORD publishes the Dance Research Journal, and sponsors annual conferences which distribute annual awards. CORD is being presented in Roanoke for the very first time thus establishing Roanoke as a significant location in the international dance world. At the center, is Hollins University who has for the past 16 years been a hub for over 100 guest artists, teaching, dancing and creating work. So it is no surprise that Hollins has also produced “a wealth of rigorous and provocative artists—most notably Ann Liv Young, but also Shani Collins, Erika Hand, Isabel Lewis, Jillian Peña, Katy Pyle, Regina Rocke and Emily Wexler. “(Time Out New York / Issue 657 : Apr 30–May 6, 2008) Some of these artists will be performing this weekend!

A synopsis of this year’s CORD conference at Hollins… Dance studies and global feminisms
The market forces of globalization tend to flatten the uneven terrain of spaces and map out the world in terms of flow of capital. How, within this context, can we create a resistant feminine space of Dance Studies? What would that space look like, how would it feel?  How are feminist concerns constructed within dance studies, and how are they negotiated? How have global feminisms emerged, and what can they do?  What can dance studies do in relation to the space of a global feminine? How has “the feminine” survived asymmetrical tensions of market forces? The 41st Annual CORD Conference will include three days of presentations, roundtables and lecture-demonstrations to address these questions.

Fall Dance Gathering Schedule :: Map
November 13 Salon Performance Botetourt Building, Dance Studio 2 10:30pm
November 14 Hollins University Theatre 8pm
*Open Contact Improvisation Jam to follow in Botetourt Building, Dance Studio 2
November 15 Hollins University Theatre 8pm
$7 General Admission, $5 Children an Seniors, free to Hollins Community

For more info on CORD schedule of events, click here
Here is a sample of presentations at this year’s CORD:

• Film Screening: Night Passage, Q&A with Trinh T. Minh-ha
• 3″ Golden Lotus: The Tradition of Bound Feet as Depicted in Contemporary Choreography
• Utube, Beyonceworld, and second Life: do girls still go to Ballet?..
• Looking Backward and Forward at Authenticity: the “authentic” Hula and Chinese Dance in Hawai’i
• Reclaiming the Feminine: Bellydancing as a Feminist Project
• Dancing Like a Girl: The Oral History of B-Girls in NYC in the 1990s
• The Many Deaths of John Wayne: Toward a Butch-Femme Aesthetic of Democracy
• The Cultural body and The Politics of Difference: How Korean Dance is Commodified in the Politics of Tourism