This story was originally published by ArtsATL.
This week’s Modern Atlanta Dance Festival will offer “seven different visions” of contemporary style in one public performance, MAD Fest host Douglas Scott says.
The event on Friday night, June 16, at the Emory Performing Arts Studio will include a range of modern dance styles and explore themes as varied as family, love and loss, the sacred and profane, cultural and racial identity and even quantum physics.
“If you don’t like that first piece, maybe the next one will be a work that really speaks to you,” Scott said.
Scott, who is the artistic and executive director of Atlanta’s Full Radius Dance company, told ArtsATL why he loves the performance format and has dedicated so much energy into the annual event nicknamed MAD Fest.
“It started out in the early years because people would tell me they don’t like modern dance or they don’t like dance,” he said. When Scott would ask why, “they would say ‘I saw this one company.’ So I would say, ‘You watch one show on TV, and now you don’t like TV anymore?’”
The 31st annual festival is set for Thursday and Friday and coincides this year with Dance/USA’s 2023 Conference, giving a national audience the chance to view a juried sample from some of Atlanta’s standouts in contemporary dance. Scott is one of three leaders in the Atlanta area dance community who will receive Dance/USA’s Champion Award this week.
For most of its history, MAD Fest has featured a slate of seven pieces selected from a large pool of applicants by a panel of nationally prominent artists from dance and other disciplines. Some members of the local organizing committee for the Dance/USA Conference helped judge this year.
Credit: Gianna Mercandetti
Credit: Gianna Mercandetti
MAD Fest’s performance will feature works from Atlanta Chinese Dance Company, Audrey Crabtree, Full Radius Dance, Lashonda Johnson, Kit Modus, Julio Medina and Scott Wheet, and Novoa Dances.
Atlanta Chinese Dance Company will present “Ribbon Dance of Empowerment,” the finale of a longer work in which choreographer and artistic director Kerry Lee tells the story of her experience as a Chinese American growing up within the racial binary of Black and white in the American South. The piece gives a taste of the company’s signature fusion of contemporary dance with traditional Chinese forms.
Audrey Crabtree’s “Wail” will feature the music of Sammy Davis Jr. and an up-tempo, jazz-inspired vocabulary reflecting the iconic singer’s vocal style.
Full Radius Dance will perform an excerpt of Scott’s work-in-progress, “Saint.” The work is inspired by the “question of how one becomes closer to God, and the idea, which frankly, I find absurd, that you only get closer to God and sainthood by suffering,” Scott said. “I mean why can’t you be a saint because you supported local dance, or you just led a really good life where you loved everybody around you?” “Saint” examines how a single life can embody both the sacred and profane and who gets to decide which is which.
Lashonda Johnson, one of the Dance Canvas 2023 artist cohort, created “I Pledge My Heart” to depict the risks and rewards of “giving your all” to relationships, career and even pastimes.
Credit: Stephanie Gough
Credit: Stephanie Gough
Kit Modus will share an excerpt from artistic director Jillian Mitchell’s “Scion,” which explores the familial and physical interactions that shape the universe.
Two pairs of duets will depart from convention.
Julio Medina and Scott Wheet collaborated to create a dance about the physicality and synergy that arises when cis-male bodies share performance space together. The working title of their piece is “innermost.”
“Momentary Impulse,” a piece from Novoa Dances choreographer Meaghan Novoa, grew out of her love for neoclassical pas de deux, or a dance duet, and a desire to see queer embodiments of divine inspiration narratives.
PERFORMANCE PREVIEW
Modern Atlanta Dance Festival
8 p.m. Friday, June 16. Suggested price: $20. Emory Performing Arts Studio, 1804 N. Decatur Road, Atlanta. 404-724-9663, fullradiusdance.org.
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Robin Wharton studied dance at the School of American Ballet and the Pacific Northwest Ballet School. As an undergraduate at Tulane University in New Orleans, she was a member of the Newcomb Dance Company. In addition to a Bachelor of Arts in English from Tulane, Robin holds a law degree and a Ph.D. in English, both from the University of Georgia.
Credit: ArtsATL
Credit: ArtsATL
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