Dance Series

2024-2025 Dance Series

Oluwadamilare (Dare) Ayorinde

with Lawrence University faculty and alum collaborative artists

Mauriah Donegan Kraker (dance) | Margaret Sunghe Paek (dance) | Kate Stenson ’24 (voice/looping) | Mark Urness (bass) | Jean Carlo Ureña González (percussion)

Wednesday, November 6, 2024 • 7 p.m.
Lawrence Memorial Chapel
Free admission

Come experience/witness this improvisational performance practice of musicians and movers spontaneously composing together. Dare, alongside Lawrence collaborators, will gather and create, sharing some of their creative process in this community endeavor.

Oluwadamilare (Dare) Ayorinde is a full living human being excited for another opportunity to be in the Midwest. With dance, they practice improvisation as research, liberation, performance. They enjoy dancing in different contexts.

Elise Knudson + rebeca medina

Saturday, January 18, 2025 • 7 p.m.
Esch Studio, Warch Campus Center
Free admission

Elise Knudson (eliseknudson.org) is a New York City based dance artist who recently relocated to San Jose, CA to teach at SJSU. She loves trees and improvisation as they both distil life out of thin air with the help of a little water. Elise taught Contact Improvisation for Movement Research and facilitates CI at festivals and studios such as Touch Festival (China), Leviathan Studio (Canada), WCCI Jam (Berkeley, USA) and Moab Jam (Utah). Elise has taught repertory and CI at Manhattanville College and Theory and Practice of Dance Improvisation at Yale University. She created NEXToNow, modeled after The Impermanent Society of Philadelphia to provide a platform for the practice of performing interdisciplinary free improvisation. Honored by the opportunity to perform improvised dance with Nancy Stark Smith, David Appel, Chris Aiken&Angie Hauser, Alicia Greyson, Bradley Teal Ellis and Margaret Paek, Elise is also grateful for the opportunity to perform choreography with various Artists, including Christopher Williams, Jenni Hong Dance, Kiori Kawai/Purring Tiger, Risa Jaroslow, Jody Oberfelder, David Appel, Koosil-ja/DANCE KUMIKO and as a ‘community member’ with Bill T. Jones in Deep Blue Sea. Over the years Elise has choreographed aerial dances, experimental installations and concert dances for stages large and small.

rebeca medina. Improviser. Dancer. Choreographer. Craniosacral Therapist. Mother. Admirer of plants and disciple of their secrets. Interested in the magic of time and the power of community. Addicted to interdisciplinary collaborations. Curious about slow rhythms. Devoted to practicing Contact Improvisation since 2002. Immigrant from Bogotá, Colombia. Her choreographic questions and ideas about interdisciplinarity led her to obtain a master’s degree in theater and live arts from the National University of Colombia in 2011. That same year she moved to New York City, where for twelve years she performed and collaborated with theater companies, choreographers, video artists, poets, photographers, musicians, and herbalists, like Sister Sylvester, Agnes Borinsky, Dai Jian, Yoshiko Chuma and The School of Hard Knocks, Megan Byrne, Alex Zaccarello, Tatyana Tenembaum, and Miriam Parker, among many others. Between 2009 and 2024, rebeca has been granted various dance residencies in Colombia, Uruguay, Chile, Venezuela and the United States. She organized, curated and produced the monthly dance series Dåncēhølø in Ridgewood, Queens, in 2018 and 2019.

bkSOUL

Saturday, April 12, 2025 • 7 p.m.
Esch Studio, Warch Campus Center
Free admission

bkSOUL was founded in 2001 by Dr. grace shinhae jun as a space to explore the relationship between Hip Hop culture and modern dance, debuting with the evening length work Women Warriors in Love & Hip Hop. The company began as a bi-coastal company (San Diego – Brooklyn), teaching and performing at various venues in Southern California, Brooklyn, New York City, Chicago, Seattle, Philadelphia, Indiana, San Francisco, and Mexico. In 2006, bkSOUL deepened its roots in San Diego and began collaborating with Collective Purpose (Ant Black, Kendrick Dial and Rudy Francisco), blending together movement, poetry, and live music to center on issues of social justice and communities of color through a Hip Hop framework. This award-winning performance company has created seven evening length works: The Movement (2007), Hip Hop Saved My Life (2009), Love H.E.R. (2013), Illegible (2015), Still Moving (2016), The Lioness (2017), Get Free (2019) and received “Best Musical Performance” (2016), “Outstanding Performance” (2017), and “Outstanding Multidisciplinary Production” (2019) for their work at the San Diego International Fringe Festival. bkSOUL was in residence at Lawrence University and performed their critically-acclaimed work Illegible. In 2016, celebrating the 10 years of working together the dancers, the poets, and musicians fully merged to perform solely as the conscious performance group bkSOUL. As educators, mothers, fathers, activists, and artists, bkSOUL is committed to education through the arts, to courageous insight and truth, and to helping strengthen our justice movement today.