In a double bill of DMV stalwarts and old favorites, local artist Adriane Fang pairs up with Gesel Mason Performance Projects of Colorado to deliver a unique palette of artistic visions in contrast and collaboration. This collage of work at Dance Place on Saturday, March 28 at 8pm and Sunday, March 29 at 7pm brings together these diverse artists for a special weekend of varied perspectives.
“Bessie” Award winner Adriane Fang, praised for “uncannily encompassing minute detail and wild abandon so effortlessly,” collaborates with acclaimed choreographers Wally Cardona and Nancy Bannon on new works.
Gesel Mason Performance Projects presents You Are Why! by Rennie Harris, a driving trio of women set to grooving house music that evolves into one woman’s journey of resisting, exploring, and embodying her sexuality. Plus an excerpt from Gesel Mason’s savvy and humorous The Name Game, commenting on stereotypes of modern dance, strip tease and the evolution of “twerking.”
About Adriane Fang
Adriane Fang is a dancer, teacher, choreographer, and assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies (TDPS) with a keen interest in multi-disciplinary collaboration. Recent projects include teaming up with fellow TDPS members Jared Mezzochi, Robert Denton, and J.D. Madsen to create a flash mob for Connect4Climate at the World Bank that featured images projected directly upon the banker/dancers. Gravity, a dance presented in the Fall 2012 Maryland Dance Ensemble Concert, brought together an alliance with Professor Cole Miller of the UMD Astronomy Department and Dr. Umberto Cannella of the UMD Physics Department as well as interactive projections designs by Drew Kaufman, costumes by Kate Fulop, and lighting by Paul D. Jackson. Last season, Adriane was the director of the Spring Maryland Dance Ensemble Concert for the second time and performed Alvin Mayes’ While Waiting in fall MDE and the Baltimore Dance Invitational Showcase. This past summer, she taught at Dance New Amsterdam in New York City and studied with somatics master-teacher Irene Dowd. Formerly a 10-year member of Doug Varone and Dancers, Adriane is the proud recipient of a 2007 New York Dance and Performance Award (“Bessie”).
About Gesel Mason
Gesel Mason is a choreographer, performer, educator, and arts facilitator. She is Artistic Director for Gesel Mason Performance Projects and has been Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder since 2013. She was a company member of Liz Lerman Dance Exchange and Ralph Lemon/Cross Performance Projects. She has also performed with Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, Repertory Dance Theatre of Utah and under the direction of Chuck Davis, Jacek Łumiński (Silesian Dance Theatre), Murray Louis and Victoria Marks.
Mason utilizes dance, theater, humor and storytelling to bring visibility to voices unheard, situations neglected or perspectives considered taboo. Her interests include the performances of identity, sexuality and the ways we create otherness. Her current creative research collides the genres and cultures of postmodern dance and erotic dance in an embodied effort to find and hold on to what Audre Lorde calls “the yes within ourselves” and to “touch our most profoundly creative source [in a way that is] female and self-affirming in the face of a racist, patriarchal and anti-erotic society”.
In 2007, Mason received the Millennium Stage Local Dance Commissioning Project from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. She was awarded University of Utah’s first Distinguished Alumna Award in Fine Arts and the Washington Performing Arts Society’s Pola Nirenska Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance in 2009. In 2011, Mason was one of six choreographers selected by the Joyce Theater for a Rockefeller Residency Initiative.
WHAT: Adriane Fang & Gesel Mason Performance Projects
WHEN: Saturday, March 28 at 8pm and Sunday, March 29 at 7pm
WHERE: Dance Place, 3225 8th Street NE, Washington, DC 20017; two blocks from Redline Brookland/CUA Metro station; free and convenient parking
TICKETS: $30 Admission At the Door; $25 Admission (Advance Sales only)*; $20 Dance Place Members, Seniors (55+), Artists (Advance Sales only)*; $15 College Students and Children (17 & under)
*Advance Sales end 4 hours prior to performance start time.
For tickets and more information, visit danceplace.org or call 202-269-1600.
