Thanks to life-long Woods Hole summer resident Nancy Lassalle, the Woods Hole Public Library will be offering a series of lectures and films about dance in America this summer. The talks will be held on four sequential Wednesday evenings in July, starting July 8. All will be held in the lower level meeting room and will start at 7:30 PM.
The first will be given by Woods Hole summer resident Gretchen Ward Warren, who had a career as a professional ballerina, eventually becoming a a professor of dance in Florida. She also became a choreographer, weaving her interest in traditional native dance into new forms.
She will talk is titled “Paul Taylor, America’s Greatest Living Choreographer.” She praised him in saying “At 85, an age when most artists’ best work is behind them, Paul Taylor, one of the seminal choreographers of the 20th and 21st centuries, continues to win public and critical acclaim for the vibrancy, relevance and power of his dances. He offers cogent observations on life’s complexities while tackling some of society’s thorniest issues. While he may propel his dancers through space for the sheer beauty of it, he more frequently uses them to illuminate such profound issues as war, piety, spirituality, sexuality, morality and mortality. This lecture will touch upon his remarkable, creative life as revealed in his award winning autobiography, Private Domain, and feature video excerpts from some of his most powerful and iconic works”.
Mr. Taylor is curating and presenting great modern dances of the past and present alongside his own works at Lincoln Center and other preeminent venues throughout the world, and commissioning a new generation of choreographers to make dances on his own Company so that modern dance flourishes long into the future. His troupe will be performing on Martha’s Vineyard the week after Ms. Warren’s talk, so the event at the Library can be seen as a felicitous introduction.
The second evening in the Lassalle Dance Series will be the film “Ballet 422” on July 16. The third will feature a talk by Anna Kisselgoff dance critic and cultural news reporter for the New York Times, and the fourth will be a showing of Elizabeth’s Streb’s film ”Born to Fly”.
All these events are free and open to the public. For more information, call the Library at 508-548-8961.