Angharad Davies makes new dance works that embrace emotionality and straddle the line between the sincere and the synthetic. She is pro-narrative, influenced by the fragmentation of collage and mash-ups, and captivated by the hard jump cuts of film, television, and comic book art. The Scraps (working title), found inspiration from a feeling that surfaced after the birth of her daughter: all at once, there existed no past or future, only a present and falling through it. This new project explores identity as memories fade, change, or disappear altogether. Davies turns her choreographic lens onto the elliptical DNA of perception. Through the mashing together of a precise gestural vocabulary with abandoned choreography, text, and music, the performers fall repeatedly for much of the duration of the work. In the process, they grasp for answers to the following question: Who do we become without our memories?

Nic Lincoln is an instinctive seeker of beauty who takes inspiration from pop culture and visual art to voice his activism through dance. For nine years, James Sewell Ballet has acted as his creative incubator. The recipient of a 2011 McKnight Artist Fellowship for Dance, Lincoln has been named “Best Dancer” by City Pages and one of three “Artists Who We Love” by Minnesota Monthly magazine. His new work is for an all-male quintet, which explores primal tendencies of societies by examining group behaviors in animals and hyper-sexualized personas to address the relationship between gender and power. This is his first time choreographing specifically on men. As a gay man, this change in gender, although a simple idea, presents endless new artistic variations. The new work features dancers from James Sewell Ballet, TU Dance, and Zenon as well as original music performed by Venus De Mars, lead singer of All the Pretty Horses.

Meet the Artists

Postshow Discussion

Friday, July 17
Join the artists after the show for a discussion about the new work.