More than a year after it was supposed to, the new Glorya
Kaufman Dance Theater will open its doors tonight for the first
time to audiences instead of construction workers.
The World Arts and Cultures department’s second Faculty
Festival of Performances, which features works choreographed by WAC
faculty and performed by current and former WAC students, will
inaugurate the state-of-the-art theater in the recently opened
Kaufman Hall. The first Faculty Festival, held in spring 2004, was
originally conceived to open the theater, but construction delays
moved the performances to the Kinross Building in Westwood. This
year’s festival will perform nightly in the Glorya Kaufman
Dance Theater from tonight through Saturday.
Additionally, the theater’s opening weekend will include a
free open house in Kaufman Hall on Saturday called WAC Is Back,
which will feature student, faculty and alumni performances, as
well as discussions, workshops and refreshments. WAC Is Back was
also originally planned for last year’s opening but was
delayed because of construction.
“If it doesn’t happen this time, it’s probably
not going to happen at all,” said Dan Froot, producer of WAC
Is Back and adjunct assistant professor in the department.
“It would have to be something catastrophic.”
The WAC department has operated out of the Kinross Building for
the past four years during the construction of Kaufman Hall, and
moves back to campus in the same year the department celebrates its
10th anniversary.
“There’s been a lot of hurrying and scurrying
getting the building ready,” said Angelia Leung, producer of
the Faculty Festival and a WAC associate professor. “You
always encounter technical problems.”
This year’s Faculty Festival includes six dances, each
about 10 to 15 minutes long. Guest artist Rennie Harris and WAC
Professor Victoria Marks choreographed two dances each for the
festival, and WAC chairman and Professor David Rousseve and WAC
assistant Professor Cheng-Chieh Yu contributed one each. One of
Marks’ pieces, “Not About Iraq,” was meant to
premiere at the Faculty Festival, but already performed at Highways
Performance Space in May because of Kaufman’s delays.
“It’s about Iraq,” Marks said of the dance.
“I realized I couldn’t make anything in the midst of
the war in Iraq and not feel that was in my
consciousness.”
Marks will perform the duet with a recent graduate of the WAC
department. The original plan for both the Faculty Festival and WAC
Is Back was to have current students perform most of the dances,
but because planning for the events began more than two years ago,
many of the students involved have graduated.
Froot estimated that alumni make up about half of the volunteer
involvement in WAC Is Back, with faculty making up about a third
and students comprising the remaining 17 percent. Then again, Froot
began producing WAC Is Back more than two and a half years ago.
“We made an open call to faculty, alumni and students to
do something for WAC is Back,” Froot said. “We took
almost every single one of those, but they had to be postponed two
more times. Some have dropped out.”