CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The dance department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will present February Dance 2025: Fast Forward this week at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. February Dance will be one of the first performances in the newly renovated Colwell Playhouse Theatre since its reopening. The performances are Jan. 30-Feb. 1.
Dance professor and choreographer Rebecca Nettl-Fiol and soprano Elena Negruta collaborated on “Ayre,” named after the music they use, a song cycle by Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov. The two had been looking for a project to work together on and Negruta suggested “Ayre,” which is based on folk songs of Andalusia, with Mediterranean, Arabic and Jewish influences.
“It’s just such a passionate and beautiful piece,” Nettl-Fiol said.
Golijov said that the music speaks to his feelings of not belonging to any particular culture, a sensibility that feels very current, Nettl-Fiol said.
She chose several works from the song cycle, including a one-minute poem without music, a lullaby and a rhythmic folk song. Eight dancers perform in various groups, including a solo to a lullaby that indicates loss, duets to a guitar solo, a trio that elicits feelings of childhood, a high-energy folk dance and a joyous, hopeful ending with all the dancers onstage.
School of Music composition professor Stephen Taylor’s Illinois Modern Ensemble will play the score, which will give the dancers the opportunity to perform to live music, Nettl-Fiol said. They’ll perform a slightly reworked version of the piece at the Illinois Modern Ensemble concert on Feb. 26 at KCPA.
Dance professor Paige Caldarella choreographed “AGE” with dance alumna Anna Peretz Rogovoy, now teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The work is a “sneaker ballet” — a contemporary ballet work performed in sneakers — and the title is a play on the choreographers’ names and the age difference between them.
Caldarella said she and Rogovoy share a love of ballet and the modern dance technique of Merce Cunningham, and their work grew out of a class in which they were looking for ways to make them more accessible. They also were inspired by dance videos produced during the COVID-19 pandemic in different settings, including those by choreographer Justin Peck, who creates ballets to be performed in sneakers.
Caldarella said that in ballet class, “the shoes and the clothing can sometimes limit how I feel. I can sometimes feel a bit restricted. One of the things Anna and I are interested in is that ballet doesn’t have to feel that way.”
Their dancers will wear lightweight sneakers with a special sticker on the sole that helps them move more easily, although they don’t provide the same range of motion that ballet shoes do. They produce more friction and cause the dancers to push off the floor differently, with more physicality than classical ballet, Caldarella said.
“In classical ballets, the dancers are trying to make it look effortless. We’re interested in seeing more of that effort,” she said.
Gabriel Gonzalez, a master’s student in dance, combines technology with dance in his thesis work, “Stunning!” He said he learned technical skills such as making Zoom videos and using green screens during the pandemic, and his choreography is an effort to bring those skills to a theater work.
The title refers to making an avatar that portrays someone differently than the way they are in real life and also to making an intense work that grabs viewers’ attention.
One of the dancers takes the role of a “screen goblin” with a monster-like quality, “almost like an internet troll personified, adept at navigating online spaces and creating online worlds,” Gonzalez said.
The goblin records the other dancers in real time through Zoom, and the video is projected onto a TV monitor on stage and onto the back of the stage. The dancers hold up fabric serving as green screens, and digitally manipulated images using Zoom chroma key software create two different views of the same dance, one on stage and one on screen.
“The audience’s attention will be bouncing back and forth, and there will be moments they find they are watching the screens rather than the dance,” he said.
Gonzalez said an important part of the dance for him is having the dancers develop the skills to use the technology.
Master’s dance student Banafsheh Amiri’s thesis work, “Khazan (Autumn)” explores the history of Iranian women and their protests for change. Amiri said she uses autumn as a metaphor for shedding the old and transitioning to a new season. She said autumn has historically been a time of protests in Iran.
Amiri, a native of Iran, said the work shows the cultural and social narratives of Iranian women and highlights the interplay of their beauty and strength.
“It feels upbeat and energetic to me, like a new beginning,” she said. “This kind of looks like my country now.”
She uses references to Iranian art, architecture, music and dance in her work. The choreography shows the delicacy and femininity of Iranian art before emphasizing the sisterhood and courage of women who are protesting. The dance is a fusion of Iranian traditional and folk dance, Latin dance and other world dance forms.
Amiri uses music from a famous song called “Khazan,” by Iranian composer Parviz Meshkatian, and new music commissioned for the work by composer Bahram Khani, who will play live with Brant Roberts. She dances and sings a traditional Iranian song in one section of the work, accompanied by the musicians playing Iranian percussion and stringed instruments.
Editor’s notes: To contact Rebecca Nettl-Fiol, email rnettl@illinois.edu. To contact Paige Caldarella, email pcunnin2@illinois.edu. To contact Gabriel Gonzalez, email gbg4@illinois.edu. To contact Banafsheh Amiri, email bamiri2@illinois.edu.
