Ruth Botchan Dance Company and Friends Present 

Tickets:
$21 at http://dancesoflifeloveloss.bpt.me
$25 at the door (Advance tickets strongly recommended)

The Ruth Botchan Dance Company will celebrate its 35th Anniversary with a concert, "Dances of Life, Love and Loss", on September 23 and 24, 2017, Saturday evening at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 7 p.m.

The program, will take place at Western Sky Studio, a center for dance and performance in Berkeley. There will be three dances choreographed by Ruth Botchan on the program, as well as pieces from choreographers Mary Reid, Jetta Martin and Claudine Naganuma.

Ruth’s newest piece is choreographed to The Italian Concerto, a breathtaking piece for piano composed by J.S. Bach. The third movement, performed for the first time on this concert, explores facets of grief, an experience that is at once deeply personal and universal, showing how life rushes on around us as our own lives stand still to mourn.

Also on the program will be two revivals. “The Second Half of Joy” is a trio reflecting on stages of a woman's life, with original music composed by Sarah Michael, preceded by a poem by Emily Dickinson from which the piece gets its title. “The White Stork” gets its title from a beautiful, newly restored synagogue in Poland where the company performed in 2008.  The synagogue miraculously survived the Nazis, but nearly fell to ruins after WWII.

Mary Reid, who has been sharing concerts with Ruth Botchan for nearly twenty years as a member of Terrain, a Dance Collective, and whose dances often have a gentle humor, will present a piece inspired by the memory of listening to favorite record albums and dancing like no one else is in the room. Jetta Martin, is a member of Ruth Botchan Dance Company and a choreographer as well. Her piece will focus on the transitory nature of our lived experience. Claudine Naganuma’s new solo work The Cloud and the Little Flame is inspired by Thich Nhat Han’s lectures on letting go.

Award winning designer and long time collaborator Cheryl Koehler will be designing costumes for her new work.

The Oakland tribune wrote of Ruth Botchan’s work that it “fused beauty, fate and synchronicity in simple satisfying shape… Botchan seemed to find movement that unfurled with opalescent lightness.”