“Danceworks 2025: signal::transfer” features ballet, tap, Afro-Colombian and contemporary dance styles to represent how information is transmitted through electricity to comment on how people communicate with each other.
Artistic Director and Theatre and Performance Studies Prof. Thomas F. DeFrantz came up with this year’s theme: “signal::transfer.”
“As people trying to understand how to live near each other in a civil society, we need all kinds of ways to move towards each other and share ideas with grace and generosity,” DeFrantz said. “So I wanted to think about ‘signal::transfer’ as the way that we learn from each other, by paying attention, listening and sharing ideas back and forth.”
The show runs for about an hour and is comprised of three main pieces. Rafael Palacios choreographed an Afro-Colombian piece titled “The City of Others,” Al Evangelista choreographed contemporary dance “at the and” and “Who’s In Charge” was choreographed by Dance Prof. Joe Bowie.
Bowie’s piece, he said, was inspired by experiences students shared with him while teaching a ballet class last quarter. In the class, he asked his students to write down their dance histories so he could get to know them better, Bowie said, adding that some of the stories were “heartbreaking.”
Hearing about his students’ experiences made Bowie think about his own experiences with ballet while working for a dance company in New York. Bowie said people from different dance companies would come together, and they would all take a ballet class to warm up.
“I just found it really interesting that despite doing very different kinds of dancing, that this was our common language, and then that (for) these students, these ballet narratives were shared,” Bowie said.
Bowie’s piece focuses on the “interstitial moments in ballet,” like notes and corrections, he said.
During the piece, words suggested by the performers are projected to demonstrate how one’s mind may become crowded by these thoughts, Bowie said.
“It became a piece about ballet, rather than a ballet,” Bowie said. “It’s a ballet about ballet.”
In addition to the three longer pieces of the show, “Danceworks” also features tap moments in between the pieces. The performers, also referred to as signal transfer agents, combine all of the pieces and wrap it all up for the audience, DeFrantz said.
“I wanted to think of the show as a singularity, because that’s how we experience it in the audience,” DeFrantz said. “So there’s no intermission. Once the lights come down at the beginning of the show, it goes until it’s over.”
Communication junior Erin Soko is one of the two signal transfer agents in the show Soko said that the show’s themes of connectivity are important in today’s world.
Soko added that she understands dance performances like “Danceworks” can be “a little heady,” but hopes audience members know “you understood it because you sat in the audience, and you felt something or you thought something.”
“‘Danceworks’ is really about dancers coming together, but also the audience coming together, having this experience with us, seeing us on the stage, thinking something, feeling something and leaving,” Soko said. “If you took anything away, then you understood the pieces.”
“Danceworks 2025 signal::transfer” will perform at 7:30 p.m. on Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday in the Louis Theater at the Virginia Wadsworth Center for the Performing Arts.
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