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Doug Elkins and Friends will present the dance Fräulein Maria, based on the classic musical The Sound of Music, 8 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 10 in the Williams Center for the Arts.
Tickets are free for Lafayette students, $6 for students at LVAIC schools, $4 for faculty and staff, and $20 for the public. They can be obtained by calling the Williams Center box office at (610) 330-5009. Elkins will give a free talk about the creation of this crowd-pleasing work and the many dance styles incorporated in his choreography at 7 p.m. in the Williams Center, room 108.
Other performances in the 2009-10 Footlights series will be Rennie Harris Puremovement, Feb. 3, $22, and Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana, March 9, $22.
Elkins and his all-star dancers take a loving and fiendishly clever new look at the great Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music in the award-winning Fräulein Maria. The dance premiered at Joe’s Pub in New York’s Public Theater in 2007 and recently was featured in summer festival headline engagements at the American Dance Festival and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. Elkins was honored for creating Fraulein Maria with a 2008 Bessie Award, presented by the New York Dance and Theater Community.
The show was called “a jewel of choreographic invention and comic subtlety” and “ceaselessly brilliant and often hilarious” by The New York Times.
Elkins began his career as a “break-boy,” touring the world with break dance groups New York Dance Express and Magnificent Force. In 1988, he founded the Doug Elkins Dance Company, which performed nationally and internationally for 15 years before disbanding in 2003. He is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, National Performance Network, Jerome Foundation, Choo-San Goh & H. Robert Magee Foundation, Dance Magazine Foundation, Metropolitan Life/American Dance Festival, Hartford Foundation, Arts International, The Greenwall Foundation, and The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts.
This Williams Center performance is part of a Pennsylvania tour supported by an Arts Connect grant from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, as part of its regional touring program supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. Educational and outreach activities, generously supported by the Dexter and Dorothy Baker Foundation, include a master class on hip-hop taught by Elkins for the dance students at the Lehigh Valley Charter School for the Performing Arts.
The 2009-2010 Performance Series at Lafayette is supported in part by gifts from Friends of the Williams Center for the Arts; by provisions of the Josephine Chidsey Williams Endowment, the J. Mahlon and Grace Buck Fund, the Croasdale Fund, the Class of ’73 Fund, the Alan and Wendy Pesky Artist-in-Residence Program, the James Bradley Fund, and the Ed Brunswick Jazz Fund; and by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Dexter and Dorothy Baker Foundation, and New England Foundation for the Arts. Special thanks to the F.M. Kirby Foundation for its extraordinary support.