Contemporary dance festival returns to Tempe

An exhilarating weekend of performances, master classes and social events featuring some of the most important voices in contemporary dance today, the Breaking Ground Contemporary Dance and Film Festival will hit the Tempe Center for the Arts in Arizona on January 25 and 26, 2019. Tightly curated by a panel of nationally recognized adjudicators, this annual festival features cutting-edge choreographers, filmmakers and performers from Arizona and around the nation.

Highlights of the festival include Noble Dance Motion’s technology-driven pieces including DRONE, an interactive work performed with an aerial drone and live streaming footage, and FRAGMENT, with livestream video projection enhancing the live performance.

Hawkinsdance will premiere a work set to an original score by Anton Faynberg. It imagines a perfect and hidden place, undisturbed and uncorrupted, subject to the laws of nature but not the effects of humanity.

Mac Allen will unpack her childhood experiences in relation to coming out as queer. Some themes in her process are opening and closing, surrendering, arriving at the pain and softening, tension and the space in between created by violence and fear, and vulnerability.

Jordan Daniels, a Breaking Ground Commissioned Artist, will present Eleanor, a framework in which to approach the topic of human uniqueness and exceptionalism. He investigates First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s life with a cast of five women.

Then presenting company, CONDER/dance, will perform and so it goes, asking, “What does the end look like?” It seeks to confront the reality that life is made up of a series of endings before the final end.

In addition, Nadar Rosano will travel from Tel Aviv, Israel to perform in Breaking Ground 2019. His piece, The Freedom To Choose, explores the human search for emotional connections and experience.

Tickets to Breaking Ground 2019 are between $18 and $28, and are now available at tempecenterforthearts.com. For more information on the festival and its full line-up, visit conderdance.com.

Photo courtesy of CONDER/dance.