April 14 Guests

INDIGO MOOR
Indigo Moor’s most recent book of poetry, Through the Stonecutter’s Window, has just been announced as this year’s winner of the nationally recognized Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize. His poetry has been described as vivid and soulful, exploring broad subjects from “dialogues with the visual arts to the natural world and the poet’s dreams and nightmares.” You may know Moor as the former vice president of the Sacramento Poetry Center, or as the author of Tap Root, a collection of poems published in 2006 by Main Street Rag’s Editor’s Select Poetry Series. He is the winner of the 2005 Vesle Fenstermaker Poetry Prize for Emerging Writers and the 2008 Jack Kerouac Poetry Prize; he was also a 2009 Pushcart Prize nominee. His work has appeared in various anthologies and journals, including the Xavier Review, LA Review, Poetry Now, and Suisun Valley Review. A graduate member of the Artist’s Residency Institute for Teaching Artists, Moor teaches residencies and workshops across the country.

UNDERGRADUATE MAIN STAGE DANCE THEATRE CHOREOGRAPHERS:
The annual Main Stage Dance/Theatre Festival returns with seven diverse new choreographies by graduate and undergraduate students at UC Davis.

KAREN ANGEL
Karen is a fourth-year double majoring in Studio Art and Dramatic Art/Dance. This is her first performance with UC Davis Department of Theatre & Dance. She has danced in many other shows including Raices de Mi Tierra two years in a row for the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival. Her piece La Muerte Azul describes one of many variables that contributed to the civil war in El Salvador where she was born. The piece focuses on land distribution before the war when peasants and rural workers were forced off their land which was given to the select wealthy few. Each of five dancers in turn portrays the elite landowner while the remaining four move in contrast as rural workers. Themes are the politics of power, a unified system (that separates), hierarchy and suffering.

TASHA COOKE
Senior Tasha Cooke is a fourth-year Dramatic Art and Films Studies double-major with a minor in Art Studio. This is her first choreography project, and she has enjoyed the process of getting to use everything she has learned over the past four years — whether through failure or new pathways of excitement. Her past UC Davis Theatre & Dance credits include THIRDeYE Theatre Festival: Empty All The Boxes (director); Private Eyes (assistant stage manager), Mainstage Dance Theatre Festival: Computer Games (dancer); Measure for Measure (assistant stage manager).  She was inspired to choreograph They Lie But Cannot Stand Up, by thrillers and other suspenseful movies — specifically by the bathroom scenes in these genres. “Bathroom scenes are my favorite. Think about proper society type Marion Crane in Hitchcock’s Psycho. The moment she steps into that bathroom she is a completely different person no longer obliging social norms. In film after film individuality and vulnerability are displayed in the bathroom.” They Lie But Cannot Stand Up explores this world of longing to connect within the social order and fluid distinctiveness trying to shine through it. The title is a play upon words from a Velvet Underground song, Pale Blue Eyes.

KELLY LeVASSEUR
Child’s Play by recent UC Davis graduate, Kelly LeVasseur, explores movement via play of childhood games and development of characters based on individuals’ roles in, and reactions to, various aspects of these games. The dance does not paint childhood games as purely innocent, but investigates the semi-sinister nature of children as they establish their identity within the playground hierarchy.

EVELYN DeFELICE
Evelyn is a third-year Dramatic Art major, and this year’s stage manager of the Main Stage Dance Theatre.