Show Summary

Six local choreographers will each create a new dance work for Diversionary Theatre’s special event, Dance/Theatre, with four performances, February 5-8. The project was conceived by Peter G. Kalivas of The PGK Project in conjunction with Diversionary’s Executive/Artistic Director Dan Kirsch. This milestone event will merge theatre and dance audiences while presenting universal stories through dance inspired by productions previously staged by Diversionary.

The choreographers were given the opportunity to select from productions from the past 22 years and create a new dance work. The choreographers and their new dance works are: Deven P. Brawley (Bent), Jessica Humphrey (Pulp), Peter G. Kalivas (M. Butterfly), Bradley R. Lundberg (Jeffrey), Daniel Marshall (Women Behind Bars) and Javier Velasco (Torch Song Trilogy).

Creative Team

Peter G. Kalivas is the artistic director of Dance/Theatre. “What is inspiration (motivate, stimulate, incite extended ideas), what inspires us?” asked Kalivas of himself and the choreographers. “How does one take this inspiration and then cross mediums or genre of expression?” Kalivas has been a critically acclaimed dancer, choreographer and teacher for more than twenty years whose performances and choreography have been presented worldwide. A Fulbright Scholar, Dance Specialist and Cultural Envoy for the U.S. Department of Education and Culture in Washington D.C., he gives master classes, provides residencies at major Colleges, Universities, and Festivals and creates work for professional companies in addition to his own, The PGK Project (A Contemporary Dance Company), www.thepgkproject.com

“We are very excited about this collaboration,” said Kirsch. “Diversionary has a long history of creating new work, and this project is a great way to connect to the dance community.” The event is funded in part by grants from The James Irvine Foundation New Connections Fund and the California Institute of Contemporary Art.

Very much interested in presenting realistic and human conditions in performance, Kalivas is creating a new duet for himself and dancer Justin Viernes, as inspired by David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly. The play is drawn from real life events, involving the strange tale of a French diplomat who carried on a twenty year relationship with a Chinese opera star without (he contended) being aware that his "perfect woman" was really a man. Kalivas hopes to untangle betrayal, exploitation, exoticism and fantasy, allowing these to unravel through movement. An original member of Sean Curran Company in New York, Kalivas was a member of Malashock Dance & Company and The San Diego Ballet and has performed with Jean Isaacs and The San Diego Opera.

Deven P. Brawley’s (Artistic Director of d’shire dance, www.dshiredance.org) early involvement with the leading voices of San Diego’s dance scene helped shape his aesthetic, one that juxtaposes everyday movement with innovative, emotionally driven, cutting edge dance. His all male company’s mission includes presenting work that speaks for the LGBT community. For Dance/Theatre, Brawley looks to Martin Sherman’s Bent, which remains one of the most shocking and moving testaments to the power of the individual in the face of overwhelming oppression. In 1934 Berlin on the eve of the Nazi incursion, two homosexual men, ranked lower on the human scale than Jews, are taken to a death camp at Dachau and branded with a pink triangle. Bent exposes the meaning of self, our responsibilities to others, and how we handle impossible situations.

Jessica Humphrey is a performing artist whose primary language is movement. Through structured improvisations and explorations, working closely with the equally enthralling, thought-provoking Leslie Seiters, (Leslie Seiters/little known dance theater, www.littleknowndance.com), she hopes to inspire work that "moves through the construction of femaleness, in and beyond the butch/femme scale." If Patricia Kane’s Pulp works to present butch/femme identity in tense historical times, this new work will revisit this sensation as it can look and feel today. Set in the twilight world of 1950's Chicago, a WAC pilot high-tails it out of the service after a dalliance with the general's daughter and heads to Chicago. The pilot lands at The Well, a club for women, where the air is filled with steamy torch songs, the spirit of Barbara Stanwyck hovers over the bar, and forbidden lust lurks behind every innuendo.

In Bradley R. Lundberg’s look at Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey, he combines spoken word and dance. Jeffrey, a gay actor/waiter, has sworn off sex after too many bouts with his partners about what is "safe" and what is not. This dance work will explore Jeffrey’s different relationships and his resulting growth, creating an aesthetic that combines pedestrian movement with the fantastic partnering and phrases Lundberg is known for. Lundberg is a dancer and choreographer with Malashock Dance and The San Diego Dance Theatre.

Daniel Marshall (Artistic Director, LaDiego Dance Theater, www.ladiego.org) meditates the creation of a new work based on Tom Eyen’s Women Behind Bars. The play is a satire on B movies of the 1950's – an innocent is duped into crime and lands in the Greenwich Village Woman's House of Detention which is presided over by a massive matron with a taste for sadism and female flesh. Looking at the struggles of confinement where one lonely dancer relives the same mundane day, they wait for redemption and/or relief. Marshall has toured nationally and internationally with Cleo Parker Robinson’s Company in Denver and The Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, and has worked with many of the premiere companies in San Diego.

“When many people think of Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy, they think of the drag element of the show,” explained Javier Velasco, Artistic Director of The San Diego Ballet (www.sandiegoballet.org). “The thing is that the main character only appears in drag in the first minutes of the show. The play is an exploration of the three act structure, which is also the classic three movement concerto structure. By dealing with each section as a “torch song,” Fierstein was elevating both the kitschy type of music and the gay men who swore by it. For me, the choice of the play was a simple one – three torch songs telling a simple story of desire, unrequited love, and resolution.”

Press Photos

Deven P. Brawley	Jessica Humphrey	Peter G. Kalivas

 

See photos from the event at www.rotepix.com

Press Release

New dance works created in “Dance/Theatre” at Diversionary

Inspired by Theatre/Created through Dance

Six local choreographers will each create a new dance work for Diversionary Theatre’s special event, Dance/Theatre, with four performances, February 5-8. The project was conceived by Peter G. Kalivas of The PGK Project in conjunction with Diversionary’s Executive/Artistic Director Dan Kirsch. This milestone event will merge theatre and dance audiences while presenting universal stories through dance inspired by productions previously staged by Diversionary.

The choreographers were given the opportunity to select from productions from the past 22 years and create a new dance work. The choreographers and their new dance works are: Deven P. Brawley (Bent), Jessica Humphrey (Pulp), Peter G. Kalivas (M. Butterfly), Bradley R. Lundberg (Jeffrey), Daniel Marshall (Women Behind Bars) and Javier Velasco (Torch Song Trilogy).

Dance/Theatre (Inspired by Theatre/Created through Dance) will be performed February 5-8 at Diversionary Theatre, located at 4545 Park Boulevard in San Diego. Performance times are: Thursday at 7:30pm, Friday and Saturday at 8:00pm and Sunday at 2:00pm. Tickets are $24 for all performances. For information, call the Diversionary box office at 619.220.0097 or log on to www.diversionary.org.

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Financial support for Diversionary Theatre is provided in part by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture

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