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These four dance works, which make up this year’s University Dance Theater concert February 2 through 4, showcase how the dance program’s professional training produces dancers with tremendous technical ability and artistic versatility. The show, aptly titled “Dance Revolutions: Dance that Embraces Difference,” also exemplifies the ways in which the dance program’s educational approach promotes and accomplishes such learning.

First of all, each faculty member in the dance department choreographs and/or performs with his or her own dance company (a rarity among university dance programs) with a distinctive movement vocabulary and style. As faculty, they teach their choreographic styles to students during technique classes; they also impart to students the knowledge they acquire as directors of dance companies—their research pursuits—to broaden the students’ understanding of the creative process.

Associate professor Ananya Chatterjea, for instance, who is also artistic director of the all-female Ananya Dance Theatre, taught the University Dance Theater performers her singular choreographic blend of yoga, the classical Indian dance form Odissi, and the martial art Chau before making Khonj with the students’ input. Dance theater rehearsal director Toni Pierce-Sands teaches the fluid, expressive Horton dance technique. She’s also co-artistic director of TU Dance with her husband, Uri Sands, and helped him teach Happy to the students.

“Within our program, we have a broad range of styles and techniques,” says Pierce-Sands. “We already expect our student dancers to transition from style to style, and that prepares them to take on diverse repertory.” That repertory is generated largely through the Sage Cowles Land Grant Chair Guest Artist Program, now in its 20th year. Through this program, the dance department expands on its in-house versatility by inviting an array of dance artists, scholars, and teachers from around the country to work with students every year.

Selection criteria include a dance artist’s reputation, work quality, and teaching ability, as well as the variety of experience they’ll be able to offer the students. In making its annual Cowles selections, the department also seeks to include emerging choreographers; dance artists of diverse racial or ethnic backgrounds, sexual identities, and physical abilities; and choreographers practicing and working in a range of dance forms. During their residencies, the guest artists also teach students the unique movement styles they practice, along with a dance work to perform during the annual concert.

“The dance program is actively pursuing a strategy of embracing difference by bringing in guest teachers and artists who introduce the students to multiple perspectives on aesthetic and socio-political issues,” explains dance-department director Carl Flink (B.A. ’90). He also teaches a dance-technique class centered on the highly physical movement style performed by his company, Black Label Movement.

The four choreographers with works in this concert, three of them Cowles artists, Flink adds, “exemplify high-quality aesthetics and the importance of difference as an engine for artistry. Three of the works are by women. Two are by people of color. One choreographer is openly gay. And two are social activists. This is the kind of range and thinking we want our students exposed to.”

Seattle-based, lesbian choreographer Pat Graney, for example, taught students the red-shoes piece, which is an excerpt from her longer work, Keeping the Faith. Choreographed in 1990, Keeping the Faith led to an arts-education project for incarcerated women and girls that Graney and her dance company continue to offer around the country. As a Cowles guest artist, Graney’s residency included lectures, performances, and work with gay youth from a Minneapolis community center.

St. Paul–based choreographer Sands, who has received numerous awards and accolades since he and Pierce-Sands debuted TU Dance, has created an accessible choreographic style that blends African dance, ballet, jazz, modern dance, social dance, and everyday movement. His residency included talking with students about his creative process and teaching technique classes on his choreographic style along with Happy. “I was amazed at how open, receptive, and responsive the students were,” Sands says. “They were willing to try almost anything.”

Anna Sokolow’s 1955 masterwork Rooms was taught to the students by Lorry May, a former dancer who performed the piece and is executive director of the Sokolow Dance Foundation in New York City. A classic modern-dance work set to a jazz score, Rooms exemplifies Sokolow’s stature as a visionary choreographer whose work stands the test of time in its powerful portrayals of hope, loneliness, and the vitality of the human spirit. The students performed the work in October at the Southern Theater in Minneapolis.

“What’s exciting to me is how this dance program brings a global world of dance to the University of Minnesota,” Chatterjea says. “Today the students work with me, tomorrow with Uri, then on a challenging feminine piece like Pat’s, and then do a classic like Rooms. Each work makes very different demands on each student. But they’re able to adjust because they know the principles of good movement. Such different repertory fits easily on the dancers’ bodies.”

As a result, during this concert, Chatterjea adds, “Audiences will see a range of what dance is and means.”

The University Dance Theatre’s “Dance Revolutions: Dance that Embraces Difference” will be performed February 2 through 4 at the Rarig Center, 330 21st Ave. S., Minneapolis, in the West Bank Arts Quarter of the University of Minnesota. For tickets, call 612-624-2345. Visit www.theatre.umn.edu for more information.   —Camille LeFevre