Barjche

This year’s Barjche (pronounced Bar-Shay) presents innovative choreography that explores love and loss, restlessness and confusion, disease and healing, and pure athletic movement. Michelle Kliegl analyzes insomnia and restless sleep in Insomnia Lullaby, while Megan Helmers explores sleep walking in a new work, Somniloquy. Cassie Bonnett utilizes creative movement and innovative partnering as a visual metaphor for chronic disease and pain in her ensemble work, Chronic. Jamie Jo Weeden expresses the multiple aspects of one woman’s personality in Restless Spiral; and Demian Willette creates pure athletic movement, pushing the physical limits of his dancers to generate new movement. ISU Faculty member Amy Martin presents a new work titled Flow, which fuses movement forms of classical modern dance, West African dance, and Salsa, while Director of Dance, Janice Baker, takes a comedic look at greed, possession and paranoia in Game of Mine. Other featured choreographers are faculty member Vernon Windsor, along with students Courtney McClimon, Kelly Bartlett, Ashley Miller, Jill Elgin, and Laura Geiger.

Highlighting the evening is Between 7 pm and 2 am, an original work choreographed by special guest artist Sarah Hauss. Ms. Hauss, a professional dance performer, choreographer and teacher from Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN, has worked with choreographers and dancers throughout the United States, and presented her own choreography in Oregon, New York, Colorado and Minnesota. Ms. Hauss spent two weekends working with students from the Orchesis I Dance Club of ISU, and created this new work for them. This exciting dance blends spoken word with inventive movement, and combines pedestrian gestures such as waving, shaking hands, and hugging, with vigorous, energetic movements that travel through space in intricate patterns. Images of nightlife, and nightclubs full of dancing and excitement are uncovered through the evolution of the dance.