W&L Dance Company & Rockbridge Symphony Unite!

W&L Dance Company & Rockbridge Symphony
Jenefer Davies, Artistic Director

Thursday, March 30 - Saturday, April 1, 2023 at 7:30 p.m.
Lenfest Center/Keller Theatre

Tickets are required.

At present, Lenfest Center's ticketing system, AudienceView, is down for an unknown period of time.

For General Public:
Upcoming performance reservations /purchases for the general public are being taken IN-PERSON ONLY at the Box Office.
We CANNOT take payments over the phone or email. The box office hours are Tuesday-Friday, 9 a.m.- 4 p.m and open 1 hour before the show time.

For those with WLU Credentials:
Click the link above and follow the instructions to reserve/purchase your tickets. Tickets reserved will be waiting for you on the night of the show in Will Call at the box office.

Adult $18
Senior $16
W&L Faculty & Staff $14
W&L Student/Student $8
Taxes and processing fees included in ticket pricing.

The Department is committed to including, supporting, and uplifting the voices of students of color and other underrepresented minority groups on the campus, and therefore dedicates at least one performance each year for which the primary artistic visionary is BIPOC.

Our guest Artistic Visionary, Justice Miles, investigates the connections between contemporary dance, flamenco, and Blackness. Miles was integral in hosting three internationally acclaimed African American dance artists this semester; Lauren Putty White, a former dancer with internationally renowned Philadanco; Rujeko Dumbutshena, who performed in the Bill T Jones Broadway production of FELA!; and Edgar Page, who trained at the Ailey School and toured with Cleo Parker Robinson Ensemble.

Additionally, this concert marks the first collaboration between W&L Dance and the Rockbridge Symphony, who have come together on this program with a shared desire to celebrate African American artists. The orchestra, under the baton of Music Director Yi-Ping Chen, will accompany nine dances set to three pioneering works by Black composers.

Dances in the Canebrakes is a groundbreaking 1930s composition by Florence Price. The first movement of the work is a syncopated ragtime, the second is reflective of "slow drag," and the final movement reflects the escapism of fancy-dress balls that likely originated on antebellum plantations as a black satire of white society.

Five Movements in Color, II Soul of Remembrance, by contemporary composer and jazz pianist Mary Watkins, was created as a statement about the African American experience. Musicologist William Runyan noted, "Its lush string textures, funereal tempo, and expressive melodic lines are an eloquent paean to lingering memories of the tragedy of the African Diaspora and its aftermath."

Finally, The River, by jazz's legendary arranger and composer, Duke Ellington, rounds out the show. Ellington's work is a ballet suite originally composed on commission in 1970 by the American Ballet Theater for choreographer Alvin Ailey. Ellington described it as "a metaphor in which the progress of a river parallels human life; from its source in a spring, growing from a rivulet to a mighty river flowing into the sea." The respective movements illustrate the journey.

The below link is for W&L Community only-faculty, staff and students. Remaining patrons will need to work with the Box Office.