New York-based choreographer, performer and teacher Anna Azrieli is showcasing her talents in the Performing Dance Company’s opening show this October. Her past work has been presented by various dance organizations such as The Chocolate Factory, Gibney Dance, Danspace Project, Food for Though, Roulettle, Elastic City and New Dance Alliance, to name a few. Her last piece, “Mirror Furor” was presented in February 2017. Azrieli was the recipient of the Movement Research AIR grant, and she has performed alongside several well-known dancers, such as Miguel Gutierrez. She has also done work for a David Bowie music video.
Azrieli’s impressive and hefty resume comes from years of training. She’s been dancing for quite a while, but it wasn’t until 2010 that she started choreographing her own pieces. In a recent interview, she talked about her initial dance training. Her first dance class was a Russian Folk dance class.
“I guess I liked it [the class] fine but I really wanted to do ballet. In the Soviet Union at that time I was not allowed to take ballet or gymnastics because my body was not the right size. I was only allowed to do folk dance because they wore skirts that covered the ‘wrong’ body parts,” Azrieli said.
Azrieli’s piece in the show is entitled “The Feminist Quiver has Legs of Quaking Clouds,” and she had a clear, precise vision of what she wanted to capture with it.
“The piece has structural repetition, rhythmic self-slapping movement/sound actions and shows many ways the body vibrates. It invokes a world where the individual and group blend, then mutate into a new configuration. The performers made their own variations on the themes I put before them. The original movement concept comes from the ‘ugliness’ of thighs wobbling, something our culture tries to erase. The score is created by the performers smacking flesh against flesh.”
Ultimately, Azrieli hopes that viewers take away the following message from her piece: “how difficult it is to do such movement and also how beautiful it is to see people doing odd things, woven together into a whole.”
SHOWTIMES
10/19 at 5:30 p.m., 10/20 at 7:30 p.m., and 10/21 at 7:30 p.m.
Tickets are available online at Tickets.utah.edu, by phone at 801.581.7100 or at the door 30 minutes prior to curtain.