From Blog Director Jill Randall:

Lately, I have been thinking about dance writing and dance publicity. How do we share/invite/entice/preview a work for our potential audience members? Salt Lake City-based artist Molly Heller and I are playing with this idea for the 7 days leading up to her show, very vary, at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley on December 2nd and 3rd. (Get your tickets here.)

——

Photo credit: Duhaime Movement Project

Today Molly shares about the live performance experience and its potential and importance:

I believe that performance is a sixth sense, an EXTRAordinary intelligence that connects us to the Incredible. For me, it means that I choose to believe I am capable of anything. Performance is vast, unparalleled in its extremes and transparent in its condition. It is always waiting, wanting more, needing more to sustain itself. Yet, it is also vulnerable – riding the edge of survival. I appreciate and honor the edge, where physical and psychological thresholds are challenged. Performance summons great power and also demands great responsibility. Responsibility to the audience, to one’s self, to the ritual, and to the exchange of energy.

For me, performance is a return to expression and meaning – it gathers people together to feel and experience something larger than form. It is ritual. It can be a throughway to access our potential as humans, to access the microcosms and macrocosms that we are constantly negotiating. It is a calling to separate from our habitual created realities, realities that often serve to trap us within societal molds and expectations. It allows us to recognize our potency as emotive beings – to elevate and (sometimes) escape beyond the “ordinary range of perception.”

To view a preview of very vary, please click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vek7pEbLxp4  

——

very vary, choreographed by Molly Heller

Shawl-Anderson Dance Center

2704 Alcatraz Avenue

Berkeley, CA 94705

Saturday, December 2nd at 8pm (post show Q&A with Heller and cast, moderated by Katie Faulkner)

Sunday, December 3rd at 3:30pm

Tickets: $20 General/ $15 Student

veryvary.brownpapertickets.com

——

Related links:

Artist Profile: Molly Heller

MFA Program Spotlight: University of Utah (Molly is a professor in the program)

——————-