ABOUT THE DANCES

The Wooden Floor’s Artistic Director Falon Baltzell’s piece examines the wonderment, oddity, and idiosyncrasies of pushing ourselves beyond our limits through courage and curiosity. Dancers explore moving through space and time to engineer a luminance world composed of structural landscapes and minimalistic movement design. The performers are exploring, trying to find out as much as they can about their new world, reminding the audience about the courage, curiosity, and glowing light within us all.

Choreographer Kendra Portier’s piece explores the energy, texture, color, and poeticism of geologic mechanizations – the majestic and cataclysmic. Arriving like a movement painting, the dancers move through vibrant swells of action that cascade, careen, and skitter into quicksilver rhythms and simmering pools of patience and care. Complex patterns unearthed like hills shaped by time, rivers, and wind, the performers are the architects, the painters, the creators of a world built together.

Choreographer Christina Robson’s piece, duneswept, is a meditation on constructing patterns of movement and experiencing their impermanence. The ensemble swells through space, each fleeting moment thoughtfully imprinted into the swirling melodies of the Emerson String Quartet. Like elements shape landscape, movements erode, drift and flood, forming and reforming. This work explores a continuous cycle of gestural movements, their inherent dissolve and residual impressions. duneswept is inspired by Robson’s New England upbringing and the capricious coastal landscapes of Provincetown, Massachusetts.

MEET THE CHOREOGRAPHERS

Falon Baltzell
Falon Baltzell is a minimalistic choreographer, Somatic educator, and solo performer. She is passionate about teaching youth through the Evans Technique at The Wooden Floor, where she is Artistic Director. Baltzell has shared her choreography at festivals, conferences, site specific venues, museum galleries, concert stages, and dance film nationally and in Mexico. Her research, Spatial Landscape as a Distilled Vision, has guided her choreographic investigation of spatial design as a tool for movement creation. Baltzell has served as a Field Tester for the Ohio Arts Council, Co-Chair of Creation and Presentation for the World Dance Alliance-Americas, and is a current member of NDEO.

Kendra Portier
Kendra Portier is a NYC-based teacher, performer, and maker. She has taught and performed across the globe at numerous universities, festivals, and dance facilities, many of which during her nine-year tenure with David Dorfman Dance. Her own works have been presented nationally. Kendra’s process and point of view are rooted in the physical realm – embodiment. Each work is a transdisciplinary research project crafted into rigorous dancing. Her current work is a multi-installment exploration of Color and Choreography. Kendra holds an MFA from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Currently, she is Artist in Residence at the University of Maryland College Park.

Christina Robson
Christina Robson is a performer, educator, choreographer, and a graduate MFA candidate at The University of Maryland, College Park. She has performed internationally with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, David Dorfman Dance, The Seán Curran Company, Monica Bill Barnes, Third Rail Productions, Alexandra Beller, Heidi Henderson, Kendra Portier, Deganit Shemy, and many others. Her teaching approaches movement as a form of investigation, using anatomical and imagistic suggestions to problem solve with gravity, harness momentum, hone improvisational impulses, and share relationships with others.

PARKING: 

The nearest parking structure is at the corner of Campus and West Peltason, and is right next to the theater.

Parking: Regular price is $13; IBT discounted pricing is $10. Upon entry, please tell the kiosk attendant that you are an Irvine Barclay Theatre patron.
Please note that the parking structure is operated by UCI and not by Irvine Barclay Theatre.

UCI Parking’s online pay-in-advance system is available. Click here to purchase parking in advance

We do not recommend parking in the shopping center across from the theater, as spaces are limited, and non-customer vehicles are subject to towing.

ACCESSIBILITY (can be found here)

LOCAL EATERIES (can be found here)

Arts Night Out

FREE bonus for Friday patrons!
Friday, June 3 at 6:45pm

Explore the work in Hope Abounds with the cast and choreographers Falon Baltzell, Kendra Portier, and Christina Robson at a free pre-performance chat.

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