Dance performances led by acclaimed choreographer Robert Battle and featuring 13 Lawrence University students will be held May 9 and 10, the culmination of the university’s inaugural Creator in Residence program.
Performances are set for 7 p.m. May 9 and 2:30 and 7 p.m. May 10 in the Esch Hurvis Studio in Warch Campus Center. The performances are free and open to the public. In addition, two outreach performances for Appleton Area School District students will be held during the day on May 9.
Battle—working in collaboration with Margaret Paek and Mauriah Donegan Kraker, both visiting assistant professors of dance, and Conservatory music faculty—is leading the students through the creation of an original piece of composition and choreography, titled Gather Together. It is a 20-minute work comprised of three parts. It opens, Donegan Kraker said, with an unfolding or blossoming of material—an adagio that is a welcoming to the work. The middle of the work is a solo for student Ella Fajardo-Wilde, who steadily moves through a landscape that feels like city, sky, and noisy river. She works with a smooth press, a passing through to see the horizon, the possibility of what might be next. The choreography culminates with a celebratory, high-energy ensemble dance—complex and cyclical, folding into and out of various formations.
“As we know from our practices of dance, embodiment creates pathways for curiosity, resiliency, and connection through movement,” Paek said.
Robert Battle works with students on choreography in advance of the May 9-10 performances. (Photo by Danny Damiani)
The creation of the work is part of a Creator in Residence program that aims to bring world-renowned creators to Lawrence to collaborate with and inspire students and faculty. Launched in the fall and made possible through a gift from Harold ’72 and Mary Donn ’73 Jordan, the Creator in Residence program speaks to Lawrence’s commitment to academic and artistic excellence.
Battle is an icon in the dance world, having served as artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre from 2011 until late 2023. Future Creator in Residence programming is expected to span a range of disciplines, from sciences to humanities to arts.
Battle has set the tone for the new program over the past year. The connection with students was immediate when he first came to campus for a week-long residency in the fall.
“These students are multifaceted,” Battle said. “They’re really smart, and they value art, they value dance. They have a lot to express, a lot to say.”
This innovative program will nourish you as you take an embodied, experimental approach across disciplines to art making.
When he returned to campus in February, Battle worked with students and faculty to prepare a performance built on artistic expression. It evolved organically, collaboratively. Battle said he usually comes in with steps already set, but he wanted this to be a collaborative process, with creative ideas flowing both ways.
“To me, that’s my excitement, to always be learning, investigating, trying new things,” he said. “I think this is a space where I felt safe to do that, very much supported by the faculty and by the dancers.”
Battle is now back on campus, the last leg of his residency, to finalize and present the performance, working in partnership with rehearsal director Donegan Kraker and Conservatory faculty Loren Kiyoshi Dempster and Jean Carlo Ureña Gonzalez.
Donegan Kraker said the performance “celebrates and reflects our collaborative ways of working at Lawrence: deep conversation around process, interdisciplinary projects, student/faculty collaborations.”
The musicians, she said, embraced the collaboration as fervently as did the dancers. Prior to Battle’s first visit to campus, Dempster and Ureña Gonzalez worked on building the collaborative process with percussion students by having them watch videos of Battle’s earlier choreographies without sound, co-creating original music ideas along the way.
Dempster and Ureña Gonzalez then improvised accompaniment for Battle’s dance classes as an initial connection point. They began crafting musical drafts and sending them to Battle for consideration. They brought in multiple traditions, genres, and music cultures, combining inspiration from traditional folk music, Latin jazz, blues, and Baroque classical. During the February residency, Conservatory student Luis Plaza was added to the mix, improvising on piano.
In the dance rehearsals, there was often at least one musician working live while Battle was setting choreography, and new possibilities emerged.
“There will be a few surprises – interactions that came about during rehearsals that could only happen with this kind of extended time spent together,” Paek said. “Embodied presence, creating simultaneously in time and space, allows for this kind of powerful collaboration and innovative connection. This kind of hands-on experience—creating art together as faculty, professional artists, and students—this is what Lawrence does so well and why the Creator in Residence program is so specifically well-suited to Lawrence.”
Fajardo-Wilde, a sophomore from Brooklyn, New York, said the experience has been energizing.
“When working with Robert Battle as he set work on me for my solo, we flowed in collaboration, even incorporating a section of improvisation in my solo,” she said. “This made me excited to keep coming back to work with him.”
Ed Berthiaume
Ed Berthiaume is director of public information at Lawrence University.
