Versa Style Dance Company will perform at USC Bovard Auditorium on Sept. 18. (photo courtesy of USC Visions and Voices)
Celebrate 20 years of USC Visions and Voices and 10 years of the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance with a dazzling triple bill of companies from Los Angeles’ vibrant dance scene. Decades of Dance in L.A. will take place at USC’s Bovard Auditorium on Thursday, Sept. 18, and is free and open to the public.
Launched in 2006 to engage students in the arts and humanities, USC Visions and Voices has become a vital hub for the performing arts in Los Angeles, welcoming thousands of community members to USC each year to experience a diverse array of unique events that are free and open to all.
Glorya Kaufman School of Dance is mourning the loss of internationally celebrated arts patron Glorya Kaufman, who died on Aug. 5.
The community will come together to celebrate Visions and Voices, USC Kaufman, L.A. dance and the legacy of Kaufman with three dynamic and diverse local companies with deep connections to both Visions and Voices and USC Kaufman, including two who are also celebrating their 20th anniversaries.
Led by founding artistic director Ana María Alvarez and also celebrating 20 years of exciting work, CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Theater is dedicated to transforming the world through dance by building community, facilitating dialogue and moving audiences to imagine what is possible. CONTRA-TIEMPO takes an uncompromisingly radical approach to the ways in which artists function within communities and create their work, intentionally engaging diverse audiences, cultivating dancer leaders and centering stories not traditionally heard on the concert stage. They will perform an excerpt from “joyUS justUS,” a powerful work that highlights joy as the ultimate expression of resistance.
Since Jordan Johnson and Aidan Carberry formed JA Collective when they were part of the USC Kaufman School’s inaugural class, they have blended hip hop, theater and contemporary dance into a distinctive style that blurs dance and theater, rehearsal and performance, and reality and dreams. Their choreography has been used in film projects with Talking Heads and Taika Waititi, as well as live performances by Frank Ocean and Half-Alive. They also tour with Half-Alive and serve as the band’s creative directors. Returning to USC, Johnson and Carberry will perform “Castling the Unknown,” inspired by the events of Bobby Fischer vs. Boris Spassky in the 1972 World Chess Championship in Reykjavik, Iceland.
Established by Los Angeles natives and artistic directors Jackie “Miss Funk” Lopez and Leigh “Breeze-Lee” Foaad and celebrating 20 years, Versa-Style Street Dance Company seeks to empower underserved and marginalized groups worldwide through the movement and culture of hip hop dance. Consisting of committed, highly skilled street dance artists and educators, the troupe represents the diversity and complexity of Los Angeles and harnesses the exhilarating energy of street dance onto the concert stage. They will perform an excerpt from “Freemind Freestyle,” a high-energy, improvised work that features such street dance styles as locking, popping, hip-hop and krump.
The event is free, but reservations are required. For information and to RSVP, visit visionsandvoices .usc.edu.
Bovard Auditorium is located at 3551 Trousdale Parkway.
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