EVENT: Dance Program to Sponsor Film Series

The Dance Program at the University of Rochester is hosting a film series titled Dance and Community, a six-evening exploration of the variety of roles dance can have in the lives of people and in their cultures.

Dance and Community will be held at 7 p.m. on six consecutive Tuesday evenings, Nov. 2 through Dec. 7, in Lattimore Hall, Room 201, on the University's River Campus. The film screenings are free and open to the public.

The series will begin on Nov. 2 with In Heaven There is No Beer?, a toe-tapping, high-spirited celebration of the Polish-American polka subculture, including a Polka Mass in Milwaukee and the annual Polkabration in New London, Conn. The focus will shift across the Atlantic on Nov. 9, with an array of Turkish, Yugoslavian, and Slovenian folk dances, performed and filmed in their local village settings.

Other offerings will include The Road to the Stamping Ground, Dutch ballet choreographer Jiri Kylian's documentary of Australian Aboriginal dance, and his translation of its elements into a ballet for Nederlands Dans Theater. Kylian traveled to Australia to observe the Stamping Ground, where tribes come together to participate in ritual dance. Kylian introduced a new vocabulary of new movements to western dance, which has existed for thousands of years in another part of the world.

Falling Down Stairs, part of cellist Yo Yo Ma's film series, Inspired By Bach, depicts his collaboration with choreographer Mark Morris, who adds a layer of dance to Yo Yo Ma's performance of a Bach suite for an unaccompanied cello. This film is a delightful peek at two great artists learning from one another.