The Asheville Ballet, Ann Dunn director, announces its 2017-18 Season – the 54th year for North Carolina’s Oldest Professional, non-profit Dance Company – opening with Fall Into Dance: An Artistic Harvest. This FREE concert will take place Friday and Saturday, September 22-23, at 7:30pm, outdoors downtown on the Roger McGuire Stage at Pack Square Park. Donations will be gratefully accepted. Bring a lawn chair and enjoy a night of dance and music in our beautiful city, under the stars!

www.ashevilleballet.com
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photo credits Arkady Sandoval, Michael Krout

Fall Into Dance features original choreography by Ann Dunn, Fleming Lomax, Jacob Walas, Tricia Renshaw, Emily Wood, Sandi Weinberg, and Nancy Zander.

Ann Dunn’s piece is a sketch of a work to be further developed for the Spring Concert. The music is Elliot Cole’s “Postludes” for bowed vibraphone. 18 dancers explore the careful attention that can be paid to the relationship of the body, compelled by various levels of force, to the space-time through which it moves. A meditation.

Emily Wood says of her piece, “Kick me while I’m down. It’s heavy…”, I know it hurts a lot but I promise you will get through this. You are not alone. You are loved. This too shall pass.

Nancy Zander’s up-beat and entertaining piece, “The Ninja Waltz” is a combination of darkness and exuberance, classical ballet and sheer fun. Brought to you by the splendor of Shostakovich’s music and the high spirits of popular mythology, and made possible by the power and beauty of nine ninja ballerinas.

Sandi Weinberg’s piece, “Less Is Moi”, set to music by Yo Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile, tells the story of life’s simplicity coupled with the small details and accents required to create a full life.

Renshaw’s piece, “The Beginning in the End”, is set to music by Dustin O’Halloran, Max Richter, and Ólafur Arnalds. This contemporary work delves into the notion that things are darkest before the dawn, and that a catabolic process must occur to make space for new things to arise. Old patterns, beliefs, and behaviors must be broken down and replaced with new habits and a new operating system that allow for growth and for joy and love to swell inside us and spill into our world.

Lomax and Walas will present a co-choreographed work titled “Uncollected Pieces”, set to “Fields of Gold”, written by Sting, arranged and performed by Eva Cassidy. The piece explores the following: “There is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need – not all the time, surely, but from time to time – to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember – the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.” ― Frederick Buechner, “A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces”