AT A GLANCE

WHAT: and the snow fell softly on all the living and the dead … by Granada Artist-in-Residence Ellen Bromberg; and a celebration of the work of Professor Della Davidson through choreography and performances by her long-time collaborators

WHEN:

• Thursday-Saturday, May 31-June 2 — 8 p.m.
• Sunday, June 3 — 2 p.m.

WHERE: Main Theatre, Wright Hall

TICKETS are available online: $17/19 general; $12/14 students, children and seniors.

Davidson

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His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. – from The Dead, a short story by James Joyce

•••

Dying from breast cancer, theatre and dance professor Della Davidson began collaborating with Granada Artist-in-Residence Ellen Bromberg on a new work driven by Davidson’s deep inquiry into issues of life, death and beauty.

Davidson died in March, but the project lived on. Now this work of choreography and media design, and the snow fell softly on all the living and the dead …, is going on stage, presented by the Department of Theatre and Dance as a world premiere, Thursday through Sunday, May 31 to June 3.

The department announced that each show will include a celebration of all of Davidson’s work, in a tribute of choreography, performances and film.

Bromberg and Davidson worked on the project for about a year. After Davidson’s death, Bromberg forged ahead with Kegan Marling, a former dancer with Davidson’s Sideshow Physical Theatre, and composer Ryan Ross Smith, who wrote the score.

Visual elements, including live video of various perspectives of what is happened on the stage, play a large role in a meditative environment of changing light, forms and sound. Performers exist in vignettes as images that rise and fall in time and space, engaging ideas of life, beauty and loss.

Bromberg said she hopes the audience derives “a feeling of the beauty of the present moment through images and vignettes that engage a range of human experience.”

“Della intended it as an exploration of beauty and death,” Bromberg continued. “And it is also an exploration of life. Beauty is tinged with the knowledge of its ending, as is life. They are all part of the same experience.”

Marling said the theme of death, as implied by the title, “certainly evokes a strong connection to the loss that we all are feeling.”

But, Marling said, the work actually comes from ideas and images that Davidson had been exploring for years: the permission to let beauty and pleasure exist without critique or justification; the sense of how we feel and experience time; and the capacity for art to be a meditation practice or a way to slide into our dreaming place.

Bromberg and Davidson had been friends and collaborators since their late 20s when they met at a summer dance workshop in Salt Lake City. When Bromberg became director of the San Francisco Moving Company, Davidson served as associate director.

The two collaborated in many capacities throughout their careers, including the evening-length media dance piece The Weight of Memory, which premiered at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts in 2006.

After Bromberg began pursuing video, Davidson was the first choreographer to ask Bromberg to create video for a stage work. The Mondavi Center also hosted this production: A Dream Inside Another, a collaboration with Theater Grottesco of Santa Fe, N.M.

Celebration of life

Davidson’s collaborators will present the following in the celebration of her life:

• Marling and Nol Simonse, performing a duet in the style of Davidson's celebrated work The 10 P.M. Dream.
• Kerry Mehling, solo work about mermaids and dreams of being a fish
• Eric Kupers, dance film inspired by Davidson’s creative process
• “A playful duet” by Jane Schnorrenberg, honoring the humor and joy that Davidson brought to her colleagues and audiences.

The evening will close with Undimmed, originally choreographed by Davidson and Schnorrenberg in celebration of their friend and collaborator Tracy Rhodes. The work illuminates the brightness of the human spirit and its continuation beyond death.

Schnorrenberg performed it originally as a solo; however, for this celebration, she will be joined by dancers from the San Francisco Bay Area and the Davis-Sacramento area.

Reporting by Janice Bisgaard, publicity manager for the Department of Theatre and Dance.

Read the complete news release.

Della Davidson: obituary and remembrance

More about Bromberg

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