Thanks to a generous donation from Nancy Norman Lassalle, the Woods Hole Public Library will again be hosting a summer lecture series about dance in America. Ms. Lassalle was born in New York City and lives there now, though she has spent every summer of her life in Woods Hole. She has devoted her life to ballet and has served on the Boards of both the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet. She now serves as Trustee Emerita.
The Library has been hosting this stunning series of speakers, films, and demonstrations for six years. Drawing on professional dancers, choreographers, costume designers, teachers and authors from Falmouth, New York and beyond, this year’s series promises to be equally exciting. An evening will be devoted to each of these aspects of dance: classical performance, modern dance, Afro-influenced dance and world dance.
The first presenter in this series will be Cara McManus. She grew up in Falmouth, where she graduated from Falmouth High School and spent almost a decade dancing under the direction of Laura Sciortino at Turning Pointe Dance Studio. She attended college in New York City at Fordham University and the Ailey School, graduating summa cum laude in 2015 with a BFA in dance and a BA in Comparative Literature.
After graduation, she spent a year with Graham II before joining the Martha Graham Dance Company, where she performed in New York seasons at the Joyce Theater and New York City Center and on tour across North America and Europe. She has also danced locally and nationally with the Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company. Other credits include a myriad of smaller dance and film projects at venues as diverse as Jacob’s Pillow, Battery Park, the Rockefeller Estate, and the Marianne Boesky Gallery, with choreographers who include Kat Pantos, Tadej Brdnik, Joshua Beamish, and Sue de Beer.
Cara’s talk will be on Tuesday, July 16, starting at 7:30 PM. She will address such subjects as her early training in Falmouth, her training as a college dance major at Fordham/Ailey, her professional dance career with Martha Graham Company (as well as others), her international touring experiences, and the challenges facing a modern dancer living in NYC today. She will show clips of her dancing.