Event Details


Lassalle Dance Series, #1, July 18

Thanks to life-long Woods Hole summer resident and avid supporter of the dance, Nancy Lassalle, the Woods Hole Public Library will be offering a fourth summer season of lectures about dance in America. The talks will be held on four Tuesday evenings in July and August, starting July 18. All will be held in the lower- level meeting room and will start at 7:30 PM.

As the Library’s director, Margaret McCormick says “We are so lucky and honored that Nancy Lassalle, with all her connections in the world of dance is helping us with this program.” Thanks to Ms. Lassalle’s generosity the Library is able to offer all these first-class events entirely free and open to the public

In planning each year’s lectures, the goal of the advisors for the dance lecture series is to provide evenings that are not only enjoyable, but also educational, expanding the audience’s perception of the wide world of dance. They hope to provide context for viewing dance performances, making them even richer experiences. This summer’s speakers include dancers, choreographers, and even a costume designer, enabling the audience to appreciate things on stage that they might not have noticed before.

The start of the Lassalle Dance Series is on July 18 with an evening titled “Dancers of a Certain Age: The Challenges and Joys of Late Career Performing.” Three committed and active senior dance artists, Ara Fitzgerald, Ford and Melinda Evans, will be coming from New York City and New Hampshire for an evening of conversation about their long and remarkable artistic lives. The audience will be delighted by these three brilliant, witty, and engaging dance theater artists.

Ara Fitzgerald creates dance theatre as a choreographer, writer, improviser, performer and professor. She was an early explorer of choreography with original text. Her current repertory includes: Slow Dancing Is Easy; Heavenly Display, Everything I Know About Astrology: A Short Dance; On Looking Back (Eurydice’s point of view), Words for Music Perhaps (poetry by W.B. Yeats, music by Wall Matthews and Life of a Flower and Conversations with an Ant, which are historic reconstructions of compositions by Lotte Goslar.

In addition to her own company, Ms. Fitzgerald was a member of Daniel Nagrin’s seminal company, dancing The Workgroup and The Entourage Music and Theatre Ensemble. She has choreographed on and off Broadway and taught at Connecticut College, The National Theatre Institute, Trinity Square Conservatory, and served as Director of Dance and Theatre at Manhattanville College.

 

 

Ford Evans was faculty member in the Theater Department at Dartmouth College from 2002 to 2014. From 1998 through 2012, he directed Hopkins Center Dance and the Dartmouth Dance Ensemble, which he founded in 1998. He was Professor at the University of Utah in the Department of Modern Dance from 1985 through 1997. As a professional dancer with the Repertory Dance Theatre from 1978-1985, Ford performed an extensive range of works by historical and contemporary masters of modern dance throughout the U.S. and Europe. University and professional companies have performed his choreography both domestically and internationally. Lately he has become an avid woodworker and cyclist.

Melinda Evans’ life in dance includes positions as a professional performance and guest artist, and faculty positions in modern dance. She has a degree in dance from the University of Colorado and a MA in Liberal Studies in creative writing from Dartmouth College.

 

From 1981-1995, Melinda performed an extensive repertory of contemporary and classic modern dance with Repertory Dance Theater. She was guest dance faculty at the University of Utah in 1995 and at Brigham Young University 1995-1996.

 

At Dartmouth College Hopkins Center from 2001-2012, Melinda taught modern dance classes, directed rehearsals for the Dartmouth Dance Ensemble and performed as guest artist with the Ensemble. Currently she is a Lecturer in the Theater Department at Dartmouth College and teaches a course in Creativity and Collaboration.

 

Melinda has collaborated with choreographer Marina Harris spanning three decades. She has also become a felt fiber artist and grows flowers.

 

Both Ford and Melinda, who are husband and wife, live on a small farm in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom and are members of Company X, an intimate, portable, theater project combining puppetry, animation and dance, touring in Nova Scotia, Vermont and Cape Cod.

 

 

The other four presentations in the Lassalle Dance Series will be: Tuesday, July 25, “Tutu Much! Inside the Boston Ballet Costume Shop” with Nellie Kurz; Tuesday, August 8,“Raphael Xavier, Break Dancer Extraordinaire”; and Tuesday, August 15, “Ragamala: Classical Indian Dance

The Library looks forward to continuing its relationship with professionals in the world of dance.   For more information, visit the website woodsholepubliclibrary.org or call the Library at 508-548-8961.

 

The talk will be held in the downstairs meeting room and is free and open to the public.