UPDATE: Dateline learned the morning of April 5 that Ata-Baah had dropped out of the show.

Undergraduate and graduate students have created eight new choreographies for this year's Main Stage Dance-Theatre Festival, an annual presentation of the Department of Theatre and Dance.

This year's festival is set to open  April 9, with repeat performances April 10, 16 and 18, plus two matinees on Picnic Day, April 17. See At a Glance below for details.

“Each choreography lives in its own unique world,” said Evelyn DeFelice, a third-year dramatic art major who is serving as stage manager for the festival. “The transitions from one piece to the next are often shocking. The audience is certain to be surprised and entertained.”

She expressed surprise of her own at what some of the choreographers created.

“Chrissy Noble is a very sweet, happy person. I never expected her to focus on paranoia,” DeFelice said. “Nor did I expect the melancholic Kelly LeVassuer to create such a fun, joyous piece of work.”

DeFelice said all eight choreographers, with their own personalities and quirks, have made life interesting.

“Coordinating eight separate pieces with an all-student cast, crew and designers has been hectic. I’ve learned just how key communication is.”

The choreographers and their works, with biographical information as well:

• Karen Angel—La Muerte Azul, about peasants being forced off their land in El Salvador, with the land given to a select few of the wealthy—one of the factors in El Salvador’s civil war. Dancers portray either elite landowner or rural worker, in a piece focusing on the politics of power, a unified system (that separates), hierarchy and suffering.

Angel is a fourth-year undergraduate with a double major in studio art and dramatic art-dance. This is her first performance with the Department of Theatre and Dance. She has danced in many other shows, including Raices de Mi Tierra two years in a row for the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival.

• Ata-Baah—Esa-Bra, about music and dance that originated in African villages as a form of revolution, expressing themes of identity and nationhood, and became a crucial factor in ending the colonization of the continent. By the 1960s the African music and dance had made it to the international stage, and Ata-Baah’s work tells how these African traditions came to America.

The choreographer was born into the Baah lineage of spiritual dance and drum chiefs of the central region of Ghana, in west Africa. He studied with his grandfather, learning the history of his tribe, dancing, singing and the language of the drum.

Ata-Baah majored in traditional African dance choreography at the School of Performing Arts, University of Ghana, and has studied, taught, performed and choreographed African dance in many African countries, including Ghana, Senegal, Mali, Burkina-Faso, Guinea and Gambia. He was the African nominee for the 2001 Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, a world dance program.

He has played lead roles in many movies in Ghana and other African countries; among his films are Vendator (1996), from the National Film and Television Institute in Ghana, and Paa-Suleman (2002), from the Gambian national radio and television service.

He is a first-year candidate for a Master of Fine Arts degree at UC Davis, where he played the lead role in Sara Shelton Mann’s tribes: the unified field.

• Tasha Cooke—They Lie But Cannot Stand Up, inspired by movie thrillers, and specifically by the bathroom scenes in such films. “Bathroom scenes are my favorite,” she said. “Think about proper society-type Marion Crane in Hitchcock’s Psycho. The moment she steps into that bathroom she is a completely different person no longer obliging social norms.

“In film after film, individuality and vulnerability are displayed in the bathroom.”

They Lie But Cannot Stand Up explores this world of longing to connect within the social order and the fluid distinctiveness trying to shine through it. The title is a play upon words from a Velvet Underground song, "Pale Blue Eyes"

Cooke is a fourth-year undergraduate with a double major in dramatic art and film studies, and a minor in art studio. In creating They Lie But Cannot Stand Up, her first choreography project, she said she has enjoyed the process of getting to use everything she has learned over the past four years—whether through failure or new pathways of excitement. Her previous credits with the Department of Theatre and Dance include: director, Empty All The Boxes; and assistant stage manager, Private Eyes and Measure for Measure; and dancer, Computer Games.

• Karl Frost—Who Are You? is “a dinner party without words,” according to the choreographer, who said his inspiration came from the possibility for a developed physical conversation and dialogue beyond the verbal. Who Are You? is not a composed work that tries to tell the audience something. Rather, it is part of an ongoing investigation, the results of which the performers illustrate. UC Davis students and community members comprise the cast.

Frost, a graduate student in choreography and human ecology, has been pursuing interdisciplinary performance work since the late 1980s and is recognized internationally as a leading teacher and innovator in the world of contact improvisation.

His work ranges from the purely kinesthetic to the psychological, for stage presentation and for performances that invite audience interaction. He is the director of Body Research Physical Theater and the Dancing Wilderness Project, the latter described as “a laboratory into the interrelationships among wilderness experience, body-based creative process and how we choose to live our lives.”

• Kristi Kilpatrick—Salt presents a unique perspective in its abstract view of the life of a cell, highlighting the interactions of molecules and cellular machinery, and emphasizing the day-to-day maintenance of a cell. “Salt was born out of a lower division biology class,” Kilpatrick said. “While studying how action potentials travel down nerve cell axons, I was inspired to create a movement work.”

Kilpatrick, a fourth-year undergraduate, is majoring in exercise biology major and plans to pursue medicine as a career. With dramatic art as a minor, she performed in last year's Main Stage Dance-Theatre Festival and is excited to return this year as a choreographer. She said her inspiration comes from the motions of molecules and living things, and sees no dichotomy between science and art. They are both beautiful parts of her life and she feels blessed to have such rich sources to draw from. She hopes to continue her choreography and dance in the future.

• Kelly LeVasseur—Child’s Play explores movement via the play of childhood games and the development of characters based on individuals’ roles in, and reactions to, various aspects of these games. The dance does not paint childhood games as purely innocent, but investigates the semisinister nature of children as they establish their identities within the playground hierarchy.

LeVasseur has been dancing for almost 20 years, with training in jazz, tap, ballet, lyrical, hip-hop and modern. She graduated from UC Davis in December 2009 with a Bachelor of Science degree in evolutionary anthropology. Following this project, she plans to apply for fall 2011 admission to law school.

• Devin Montoya—Frustration, grappling with various manifestations of the title; for example, human struggles to strive for the best and how people attack one another. The choreographer cited inspiration from the struggles and hardships of the choreographic process. “It was at first just frustration towards myself,” she said. “Then, as the piece progressed, it flowed into an overall concept of frustration that happens to people on a daily basis, from fighting with yourself to fighting with others.”

Montoya is senior dramatic art-dance major and religious studies minor. During her time at UC Davis, she has worked as stage manager for tribes: the unified field; as assistant stage manager for the Main Stage Dance-Theatre Festival and ShadowLight; and has been a crew member for numerous other productions. She danced in the university's production of Beyond Belief. Frustration is her first choreography to be performed on stage.

• Christina Noble—Reflux, about façade and deception as framed by Project MKULTRA, a covert CIA mind-control effort that began in the early 1950s. Reflux asks: “What dark truths linger behind the songs stuck in our heads? What are we perpetuating when we dress and act like our favorite stars? How do elements of power and privilege play into what we see, hear and believe every day? How does façade shape our interactions with each other? What's your script?”

Noble is a fourth-year undergraduate with a double major in dramatic art-dance and design (visual communications). She cited more than 18 years of experience and technical training in many forms of dance, as well as a background in choreography and teaching. At UC Davis, she has performed with the UC Davis hip-hop crew Mobility, in Tyler Eash’s I, Saint John, The Speaker, and in Marija Krtolica’s Mostly in Blue.

Reporting by Janice Bisgaard, publicity manager for the Department of Theatre and Dance.

AT A GLANCE

WHEN:

• April 9, 10 and 16—8 p.m.

• April 17 (Picnic Day)—1 and 3 p.m.

• April 18—2 p.m.

WHERE: Main Theatre, Wright Hall

TICKETS ($10-16) are available in advance from the Mondavi Center box office: (530) 754-2787 or (866) 754-2787, or mondaviarts.org. Depending on availability, tickets will be sold at the door a half-hour before curtain.

PICNIC DAY SPECIAL: $5 all tickets

DISCOUNT for school and youth groups of 10 or more: $5 per ticket, at the teacher’s or group leader’s request. To make arrangements, call the Department of Theatre and Dance, (530) 752-5863.

More from the Department of Theatre and Dance: Solo Explorations, April 2-3