Winter Works 2024 Dance Concert Purdue Contemporary Dance Company

Winter Works 2024 Dance Concert
Purdue Contemporary Dance Company
Friday, December 6 - 7:30pm
Saturday, December 7 - 2:30pm & 7:30pm
$19.50 adults - $12.00 students – $8.00 Child 12 & under
Additional donations to PCDC are welcome! https://connect.purdue.edu/s/givenow
Please contact Holly Jaycox at 765.494.5993 or hollyj@purdue.edu for more information.

The Purdue Contemporary Dance Company (PCDC), housed in the Patti and Rusty Rueff School of Design, Art, and Performance in Yue-Kong Pao Hall, presents six new works created by dance faculty, select student artists and PCDC Alumni Artists. Faculty and students in the Dance Program and Purdue Theatre, housed in the newly formed Department of Theatre and Dance, collaborate intensively to create original art on the stage, and to prepare students for careers in these performative disciplines. Original movement is created in the studio for each work over the course of the entire semester. All works are accompanied by original music/sound created specifically for these dances by students in the department’s Dance
Sound Design course, working in collaboration with their choreographers. Rueff School light-design students work with choreographers to craft special light designs on the Hansen Theatre stage. And students also gain experience through their roles as stage manager, sound and light engineers, board operators, and more. The importance of collaboration for live
performance is on full display in this dance concert which features works exploring human nature, wild nature, and the threads of connection between us all. 

The new work daily processing & NOISY THOUGHTS, choreographed by Dance Program faculty Renee Murray, shares the ongoing conversations, reflections, and experiences of all nine dancers through a wild, textural, layered, and complex dance work that conveys their inner selves through expressive movement. e-mail murra113@purdue.edu phone – 773.320.0571 (cell) hometown – Lafayette, IN 47905

Faculty Member Kathleen Hickey took inspiration from objects and acts of peeling, whether it was fruit, magnets, or people, resulting in Decorticate, a new dance work. Featuring the artistry of twelve dancers, Decorticate explores connection, or the lack thereof between bodies, space, and time through movement that pulls, twists, soars, and challenges balance.
e-mail – hickey7@purdue.edu phone – 708.203.6825 (cell) hometown – West Lafayette, IN 47906

Student choreographer Kennedy Miller, a senior studying General Management with a dance minor, explores youth and maturity in her new work Echoes of. In this piece seven dancers reflect on self-growth, the bittersweet thought of childhood, and evolving connections over time. This work is unique in its use of original projections on stage with the dancers, a process
she explored in DANC 35100 Intermedia Dance Technology. e-mail – mill3145@purdue.edu phone – 765.661.7502 (cell) hometown – Marion, IN 46952

Vanessa Bilic, student choreographer and senior graduating in December with a degree in General Education and minors in dance and history, created her first mainstage work following her choreography for the smaller XSeries productions. In Ameliorate she explores how movement and music can portray a physical and emotional journey through continuing
hardship. Six dancers use different textures of movement to convey anxiety, fear, uncertainty, and hopefulness. e-mail – vbilic@purdue.edu phone – 765.337.1259 (cell) hometown – Lafayette, IN 47909

Ally Simon, student choreographer and senior in Civil Engineering with a dance minor, explores the process of tying a knot in her new work Intertwined. In this piece, nine dancers embody the motion of knots through the use of connection, curves, and contraction. This work was selected to be presented at the American College Dance Association conference in March 2025. e-mail – aawillis@purdue.edu phone – 319.512.7812 (cell) hometown – Wentzville, MO 63385

Threaded Vein, choreographed collaboratively by alumni guest artists Nina Deno and Andrea Ridge, journeys through a peculiar creature-like world inspired by nature. The dance explores continuous connection and fluid motion that envelops space and time. Both alumni choreographers, Nina Deno, 2017, Biochemistry, Doctor of Philosophy, and Andrea Ridge,
2012, Psychology, dance and Spanish minors, have created on PCDC before and deeply value this opportunity to return to Purdue to work with the students in the Dance Program.
e-mail – ninaddeno@gmail.com phone – 218.340.6227 (cell) hometown – West Lafayette, IN 47906 e-mail – aclarsen15@gmail.com phone – 765.490.6060 (cell) hometown –Lafayette, IN 47909