Coming to the Redfern: Doug Elkins Dance Company, Timber!
From Jackie Hooper, Redfern Arts Center:
Daring aerial and circus acrobatics combined with astounding feats of agility and strength, inspired by North American lumberjacks and logging, will thrill people of all ages when Cirque Alfonse performs Timber! on Saturday, February 1, at 2 p.m. at the Redfern Arts Center at Keene State College. Tickets range from $40 to $25 and $5 for KSC students. For tickets, call the Box Office at 603-358-2168 or order online at www.keene.edu/racbp.
In their premiere American tour, this hilarious circus troupe features log-walking, spoon-clacking, hatchet-juggling, clog-dancing, and even hijinks on an outhouse. Timber! offers a smorgasbord of family fun based on the logging tradition with circus troupers performing daring knife tricks and acrobatic feats to the toe-tapping sounds of live Quebecois folk music. Cirque Alfonse creates a colorful, energetic scene of agility and strength while they juggle axes, duck and dive between whirled-about saws, and execute daring handstands, balancing acts, and acrobatic flips on stage.
In collaboration with the wild and wooly Cirque Alfonse performance, the Redfern sponsored a Best Beards at Keene State College contest. Winners of Best Beard and Best Effort will be announced a few days before the show. A photography exhibit of all people who entered the contest, both male and female, will be displayed in the lobby from January 28 to February 2. A post-show meet and greet reception with the circus troupe will follow the February 1 performance. A circus workshop for people with circus skills will take place on Friday, January 31, at 1:30 p.m. at the New England Center for Circus Arts in Brattleboro, Vt.
The Redfern performance of Cirque Alfonse’s Timber! is funded in part by the Expeditions program of the New England Foundation for the Arts, made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional support from the six New England state arts agencies.
Also from Jackie:
The Redfern Arts Center at Keene State College presents the world premiere of irreverent choreographer Doug Elkins’ Hapless Bizarre, a contemporary dance that melds slapstick comedy with hip-hop moves and ragtime music. Doug Elkins Dance company will perform this light-spirited work and Elkins’ more shadowy Mo(or)town Redux, named one of the top 10 dance pieces of 2013 by the New York Times, on Tuesday, February 4, at 7:30 p.m. in the Redfern’s Main Theatre. Tickets range from $25 to $15 depending on seating and $5 for Keene State students. Call the Box Office at 603-358-2168 or order online at www.keene.edu/racbp.
Hapless Bizarre is an exuberant mash up of physical comedy, choreography, flirtation, and romance that Elkins describes as “Merce Cunningham meets Buster Keaton.” Dancers, actors, and clowns have near misses of physical action and attraction with high flying kicks and turns eliciting a range of emotion.
Elkins pairs this new piece with his recent hit _Mo(or)town/Redux, _an hip-hop homage to Jose Limon’s famous modern-dance work _Moor’s Pavane, _which is based on Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello, using the upbeat sounds of Motown and the neo-Motown music such as Marvin Gaye and Amy Winehouse.
In conjunction with this performance, Doug Elkins will lead a dance master class on Tuesday, February 4, at 10 a.m. in the Mabel Brown Room of KSC’s Young Student Center. The same day, Elkins also will present a pre-show talk about _Mo(or)town/Redux _at 6:45 p.m. and a post-show discussion on Hapless Bizarre with Maura Keefe, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival scholar-in-residence_. _The pre-show talk will take place in the Harry Davis Room off the Redfern main lobby, and the post-show talk and reception will take place in the Redfern lobby. All these programs are free and open to the public.
The presentation of _Hapless Bizarre at the Redfern Arts Center _was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
For more on both performances, see the full stories on Timber! and Doug Elkins at the keene.edu news site.
