Bruce Wood Dance Dallas ends its sixteenth season with IGNITE, a three-work program running June 12–14 at Moody Performance Hall in the Dallas Arts District. Tickets run $25–$65 at TicketDFW.com, with $15 rush tickets available at the box office 90 minutes before each show.
The bill opens with a world premiere. Artistic director Joy Bollinger’s MOVE brings together visual artist JM Rizzi and projection designer Courtney Ware in a multimedia collaboration set to a score by Levi.Sct that layers classical piano against hip-hop and techno. Rizzi, a Brooklyn-born, Dallas-based muralist whose large-scale work spans Rockefeller Center to Shenzhen, brings a gestural, urban sensibility to the stage design, while Ware, a Sundance-featured filmmaker and co-founder of Dallas’ LightWare Labs, handles projection.
“We want to capture that electric moment when different worlds meet,” Bollinger said. “It’s the precision of classical piano hitting the gritty energy of techno, the intersection of technical movement with the raw expression of street dance, and it’s all set against an immersive landscape of vivid color and light.”
The second work is a Dallas premiere. Jessica Lang’s To Familiar Spaces in Dream enters the company’s repertoire from a choreographer who has made work for American Ballet Theatre, The Royal Ballet, and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Lang is a 2014 Bessie Award winner and currently serves as resident choreographer at Pacific Northwest Ballet.
The program closes with Zero Hour, choreographed by the company’s founder Bruce Wood and set to tangos by Astor Piazzolla and Lalo Schifrin. It’s a repertoire staple, the kind of piece that tends to anchor a season finale bill.