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The Department of Improvised Dance Presents Set and Setting
April 16, 2017 @ 5:00 pm - 8:00 pm
The Department of Improvised Dance presents Set and Setting, an evening length dance performance with live musical accompaniment by D-Town Brass in the Main Gallery at 21c Durham. There will be performances on Sunday 04.16.17 at 5pm and 7pm, as well as Monday 04.17.17 at 7pm. Tickets will be available only at the door, cash or check only. Cost is $10-$20, sliding scale.
The Department of Improvised Dance, founded and directed by Matthew Young, presents a full-length improvisation that questions the tyranny of the normal. In Set and Setting, the number of dancers, the length of the movement segments, and the musical composition (an original by D-Town Brass) all rise and fall as the performance progresses. The dance presents the audience with shifting configurations of bodies that crawl over, caress, and inspect each other with the beautiful curiosity of infants or animals. These intricate relationships, evolving in real time and set within with a hallucinatory physical environment designed and built by Young, suggest that freedom may be the opposite of normalcy and reveal that we are all wonderfully strange.
About the Artists
Matthew Young has been a movement improviser since the early 1980’s when he first allowed his considerable kinetic energy to be expressed in the relatively safe environment of the playground and his parents’ living room. It wasn’t until 2002 that he learned that dance improvisation was a sub-discipline of great breadth and depth. Since then, he has spent many hours over many years developing the skills needed to act like an insane monkey – something we all intuitively know but are discouraged from doing. Matthew has worked with choreographers and improvisers in Durham and in Austin, Texas and is particularly proud to be a part of the all-improv group, The Department of Improvised Dance – which he founded in 2014.
D-Town Brass is a 15-person psychedelic-jungle-jazz-funk-orchestra from Durham, NC. Their music blends the familiar with the avant-garde with a rhythmic punch that cannot be matched by any band ever in the history of the multiverse.
