Second Avenue Dance Company Spring Concert to Feature Noted Guest Choreographers

By Richard Pierce

The Second Avenue Dance Company will present its major spring concert series from April 2-7, featuring the work of four noted guest choreographers—Trisha Brown, Jessica Lang, Mark Morris, and Christopher Williams. The series will premiere two new works by Lang and Williams. It will also include work rotating in repertory by five student choreographers.

      The two world premieres are Prayers, Lang’s new contemporary pointe work for nine women, to the music of Pergolesi and Des Prez, and The Voyage of the Húi Corra, Williams’s dance for four men and a chorus of 12 women that was inspired by early Irish adventure tales known as voyaging and set to excerpts of the 14th century Le Messe De Tournai. Also featured will be: excerpts from Canto/Pianto (1997/98), Brown’s abstract retelling of the Orpheus myth to Monteverdi’s opera L’Orfeo, restaged by former company member Stacy Spence, and New Love Song Waltzes (1982), Morris’s early work for five men and five women to the music of Johannes Brahms’s Neue Leibeslieder Waltzes, Opus 65.

      The student choreographers and their works are Kristen Arnold and Silas Reiner with Drift to Winter, Bryan Campbell with Ticker, Philip Montana with Meetings Along the Edge, and Bergen Wheeler with quo.