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American Dance Festival announces Children's Matinees at Duke

Get your tickets now for the performances in June and July

By Rachel Casipit, Publisher of Macaroni KID Durham and Chapel Hill/South Durham May 31, 2023

Tickets are available now for American Dance Festival's Children's Matinees. The performances last 50-60 minutes. $12 Children’s Matinee tickets are made possible with support from Jody and John Arnhold/Arnhold Foundation.


Rennie Harris Puremovement American Street Dance Theater

June 10, 1:00 at the Page Auditorium at Duke


Description: The acclaimed work Nuttin’ But A Word by Rennie Harris pushes the boundaries of street dance vocabulary and forces its audience to view street dance through a different lens. Challenging the viewer’s perspective of street dance or Hip-hop dance and its culture, Nuttin’ But A Word takes you on a dramatic and abstract journey while twisting, matching, juxtaposing, and pulling vocabulary and music in ways unimaginable. Harris chooses to end this work in a traditional Hip-hop celebration, which Africanists may refer to as the Bantaba.


Purchase tickets for $12 here


Pilobolus

June 24, 1:00 at the Page Auditorium at Duke

Description: Rules @ Play is a lively, interactive show created specifically for a youth audience. Throughout life, we all encounter rules, and we usually view them negatively. Rules @ Play explores how rules actually provide opportunities to solve problems and overcome challenges. They spark creativity, and in our case, give us tools to make dances. In this fun, engaging and accessible show, Pilobolus dancers perform and analyze four of the company’s pieces through movement and discussion on and off stage, showcasing the benefit of playing by the rules.


Purchase tickets for $12 here


Ballet Hispánico

July 22, 1:00 at the Reynolds Industries Theater at Duke

Description: In the ADF-commissioned Papagayos, Omar Roman De Jesús allows us to enter the upsidedown forest, where paradise comes ready laden with wings, and psychedelic stories write themselves out of order. A three-second love ritual between two birds transforms into a movement poem celebrating the pleasure of human physicality. We can be both as we want and as we are here where the colors cry out at their maximum volume. Sometimes all we want to be is part of someone else. In her new work Sor Juana, Michelle Manzanales takes on the powerful Mexican visionary Sor Juana, who was a 17th century nun, self-taught scholar, and acclaimed writer of the Latin American colonial period and the Hispanic Baroque. Club Havana is latin dancing at its best. The intoxicating rhythms of the conga, rumba, mambo, and cha cha are brought to life by choreographer Pedro Ruiz, himself a native of Cuba, as he imagined his very own “Club Havana.” The show will also include William Forsythe’s New Sleep which first premiered in 1987 by the San Francisco Ballet.

“The members of Ballet Hispánico are 12 of the most technically accomplished and musical dancers you’ll find in the contemporary sphere.” – The Washington Post


Purchase tickets for $12 here




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