Narrative Dance Series To Be Staged At Ringling Museum

A four-part series at the Historic Asolo Theater will combine storytelling and dance in a theatrical setting.

New Stages: Narrative in Motion continues the Ringling Museum of Art's Art of Our Time initiative and features performances by Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Bill Bowers, Circle of Eleven, and the Kate Weare Company. The first performances begin in January.

These dance performances uses the power of language, gesture combined with poetry, media and music to explore diversity.

“The presentation of contemporary art at the Ringling dates back to its first executive director, A. Everett Chick Austin, Jr., who helped transformed the arts in America in the twentieth century and the Museum with the addition of the Historic Asolo Theater and Circus Museum in the late 1940s,” noted Steven High, executive director of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. “Chick advocated that, ‘the function of a museum is more than merely showing pictures….it is the place to integrate the arts and bring them alive.’ The Ringling Museum is building on his legacy and that of John and Mable Ringling. With the ‘Art of Our Time,’ we hope to enrich our community through the exploration of rich ideas and art forms at play today and in the future.”

The 2012-13 Art of Our Time season at the Ringling Museum is supported by a $50,000 grant from Gulf Coast Community Foundation.

The first of the four performances, Word Becomes Flesh runs Jan. 24-26 at 7:30 p.m. documenting pregnancy from a young single father's point of view. 

Before that, ViewPoint: The Interplay Between Music and Dance will be presented at 10:30 a.m. Jan. 19. Choreographer Elizabeth Weil Bergmann presents a duet danced by Moving Ethos directors to illustrate how music influences the way we experience modern dance.

Tickets cost $15, $20, $25 for each performance in the series. Call 941.360-7399 or visitwww.ringling.org

If purchasing tickets to all four performances in the Narrative in Motion series, get free admission to ViewPoint: The Interplay Between Music and Dance (Jan. 19, 10:30 a.m.) and FSU Dance Theatre (March 22 & 23, 7:30 p.m.).

THE PERFORMANCES

Word Becomes Flesh

Jan. 24-26, 7:30 p.m.

Named in the 2012 Class of Doris Duke Artists as one of America’s most vital and productive performing artists, Marc Bamuthi Joseph derives his performance narratives out of interdisciplinary collaboration that incorporates spoken word poetry, contemporary movement, and live music to birth a new theatrical form based on hip hop aesthetics.

Presented as a series of performed letters to an unborn son, Word Becomes Flesh documents nine months of pregnancy from a young single father’s perspective. It is a powerful and passionate plea for social responsibility and understanding that critically, lyrically, and choreographically examines the experience of fatherhood in America’s black community.

Beyond Words

Feb. 7-9, 7:30 p.m.

Bill Bowers employs an eloquent mixture of music, monologues and mime in his ongoing investigation of the silence surrounding the enigmatic matters of gender in our culture today. Often compared to Chaplin and Keaton, he has performed throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. For Beyond Words, Bowers draws his characters from life and moves beyond mere anecdotes to create a vibrant and visual poetry. With audacity and compassion he explores what it means to be a boy and the messages we receive on our way to becoming men. It is an inclusive montage that celebrates maleness and humanity in capacious terms rather than any narrow punitive viewpoint that diminishes us all.

LEO

Feb. 21-23, 7:30 p.m.

From Berlin, the Circle of Eleven blends music, acrobatics, dance, and theater into a sophisticated form of entertainment that carries on the spirit of classic German variety theater at a contemporary circus level. It is not a play, or a circus act, or a film project. It is a self-contained, genre-defying performance that won the Carol Tambor Foundation’s “Best of Edinburgh Award” in 2011 and went on to become the hottest ticket at Spoleto. LEO explores a world where gravity has shifted and the hero must undertake a logic-defying adventure that reveals not only his dreams and desires but also his lust for life. Through a clever juxtaposition of live performance with projected film, two Leos move through identical spaces governed by opposing physical laws. It is a small but meaningful story of a man stuck in a box, hoping one day to find his way out.

Kate Weare Company

March 7-9, 7:30 p.m.

With both rawness and precision, Kate Weare maps a humanism that is contemporary and profoundly stirring. Hailed for its startling combination of formal choreographic values and visceral, emotional interpretation, her work has been seen at The Joyce Theater, Danspace Project, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, American Dance Festival, and at venues throughout the U.S.

For the Historic Asolo Theater, Weare presents a program of open narrative spaces into which she invites the viewers to insert themselves and to see the work through the lens of personal experience. While in Drop Down she employs the power of tango to investigate the negotiations of erotic proximity, in Garden, she elicits innocence by drawing upon primitive issues origination, collective identity, and safety in the face of the nature’s unpredictable forces.

 Additional Program

FSU Dance Theatre

March 22 & 23, 7:30 p.m.

Works by the renowned resident faculty, alumni and guest artists performed by the highly skilled students of this top-ranked university dance program.