2004-05 PERFORMING ARTS SERIES TO OPEN WITH A PERFORMANCE BY BALLET HISPANICO

In a performance featuring a dramatic blend of ballet, modern and Latin dance forms, Ballet Hispanico will open Bryn Mawr's entertaining and eclectic Performing Arts Series on Thursday evening, Sept. 23. This year's series will also include political theater and puppetry, hip-hop, jazz dancers and singers, and chamber music by some of this country's finest performance artists and musicians.

Tickets to individual events in the Performing Arts Series are $15 for the general public, $12.50 for seniors and Bryn Mawr, Haverford and Swarthmore Colleges' faculty and staff, and $5 for Tri-College students. Subscription packages offer discounts, mix-and-match ticket flexibility and priority seating. For tickets, call the Office for the Arts at 610-526-5210.

• Season Opener: Ballet Hispanico, Thursday, Sept. 23, 8 p.m. in Goodhart Hall

Considered one of this country's foremost Hispanic-American dance companies, Ballet Hispanico was founded in 1970 by its artistic director, Tina Ramirez, whose own dance career took her throughout the United States, Canada, Cuba and Spain.

Acclaimed by audiences and critics alike, Ballet Hispanico has performed for more than two million people on three continents at major venues such as the Kennedy Center, the Annenberg Center and the Joyce Theater. This July the company performed for two weeks in Spoleto, Italy, representing the United States at the 47th edition of the Festival of Two Worlds.

• Bread & Puppet Theater: Cardboard Celebration Circus, Saturday, Oct. 23, 2 p.m. (rain date: Sunday, Oct. 24, 2 p.m. ), Thomas Cloisters

Created in New York City in the 1960s, Bread and Puppet Theater is one of the oldest non-commercial, self-supporting theaters in the country. Drawing upon ancient folk traditions, medieval morality plays, Sicilian and Balinese puppetry, Japanese Bunraku, and Punch and Judy, Bread and Puppet Theater increases awareness of social and political issues with larger-than-life puppets that are often on stilts, wearing huge masks with expressive faces, singing, dancing and playing music.

• Hip-hop Theater: An Evening With Danny Hoch, Friday, Jan. 28, 8 p.m., Goodhart Hall

Danny Hoch is an actor, playwright, director, teacher and producer known for masterful character impersonations in his one-man hip-hop shows that explore the culture and mystique of urban America.

His plays Pot Melting, Some People and Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop have toured the world, and his writings on race, class and hip-hop have appeared in the Village Voice and The New York Times.

• Jump Rhythm Jazz Project, Friday, Feb. 11, 8 p.m. , Goodhart Hall

The dancer-singers of Jump Rhythm Jazz Project celebrate the art of true jazz performance, dancing and singing in high-energy bursts to the syncopated sound of swinging jazz, the blues, Latin jazz and jazz-tinged funk. Dancer credits company founder and Artistic Director Billy Siegenfeld with "inventing the first genuine jazz technique in forty years."

• Pacifica Quartet, Friday, April 8, 8 p.m., Thomas Great Hall

One of today's most dynamic string ensembles, the Pacifica Quartet achieved international stature shortly after its founding in 1994, when it won three of chamber music's most prestigious awards: the 1996 Grand Prize at the Coleman Chamber Music competition, top prize at the 1997 Concert Artists Guild competition and the 1998 Naumburg Chamber Music Award. Commissioning and performing as many as eight new works a year, Pacifica is currently Faculty Quartet-in-Residence at University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and Quartet-in-Residence at the University of Chicago.

<<Back to Bryn Mawr Now 8/26/2004

>>Next Story