Full Circle's Day of Dance | 9-21-2014
At our November 5, 2016 concert A Woman's Place: Power, Passion, Purpose, Full Circle honored several of them with a special award. Angela Hartley Brodie, PhD is professor of pharmacology and experimental therapeutics at at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and an internationally recognized researcher at the UMMSCG Center, renowned for her groundbreaking work in the development of aromatase inhibitors. She is the recipient of both the Charles F. Kettering Prize from the General Motors Cancer Research and the Dorothy P. Landon-AACR Prize. Kimberlee Hughes-Kahl is the Volunteer Manager and Donation Coordinator for Our Daily Bread in Baltimore, which houses the largest soup kitchen in Maryland. Brion Gill (Lady Brion) is an international spoken word artist, poetry coach, activist, organizer, and educator, 2016 National Poetry Slam Champion and an Open Society Institute Fellowship recipient. Alicia McDowell is Executive Director of the Araminta Freedom Initiative, Inc., founded in 2012 in Baltimore to awaken, equip, and mobilize the community to dismantle child sex trafficking. Alyssa Dispoto is a 2013 Teach For America • Baltimore Member. Alyssa works as a Kindergarten teacher at Lakeland Elementary/ Middle School and Teaching Artist for Baltimore Dance Crews Project.
A Day of DANCE...after the storm: $5 dance classes for everyone in a festival atmosphere to benefit Baltimore’s Full Circle Dance Company. Try a new style, share the arts with your kids, lose yourself in the music, and support Full Circle’s ongoing recovery from a devastating flood that destroyed our dance home, the Morton Street Dance Center. Join us for preschool magic story dance, high energy classes for older kids, yoga and salsa for all ages, a modern class for experienced dancers, a mini performance, and more. Bring your curiosity and a dancing spirit and help us get back on our feet.
September 21, 2014, 2:00-5:00 pm, Morton Street Dance Center, 3600 Clipper Mill Road #108, Baltimore MD 21211
Full Circle Honors Women in the Community
Full Circle Partners with Local Schools
Full Circle has just completed its fourth year of creative partnership with Roland Park Elementary Middle School, providing free instruction and performing opportunities for Baltimore City public school students.
This year, 20 students in grades 3-7 learned basic modern dance technique, participated in master classes, and learned and performed choreography inspired by the swing era. The students gave five performances at school and will perform June 9 at Towson University at the Cultural Arts for Education performance.
Full Circle provides the only dance programming at Roland Park Elementary Middle School, which has recently been honored with a Kennedy Center Award for excellence in the arts.
As a teaser to Full Circle Dance Company's 12th Annual Concert, Moving Passages, the ensemble hosted its 3rd Annual Community Workshop at its resident school, Morton Street Dance Center, Inc. Students experienced a unique composition experience where they brought to life Dr. Seuss's famous book, Green Eggs and Ham. A combination of writing and improvisation led to a fantastic 8 minute work made by the students themselves, which will be presented at Moving Passages in October. Thank you to MECU and Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts for making this day possible. Here is just a snippet of the dancers' work!
Full Circle Moving Passages Workshop
Swirling jellyfish, tumbling crabs, a committee of scientists -- and a biologist, stuck in the middle, head in her hands, wrestling with a nightmare about it all. These are the features of a high-energy dance about the Chesapeake Bay that was performed Friday at Roland Park Elementary School in Baltimore.
The dance, called "A Scientist's Nightmare," was choreographed by my wife, Liz Pelton, who runs the dance club at our local school. A friendly neighborhood biologist, Dr. Eric Schott, brought a bunch of live blue crabs to the dance studio, so the dancers could observe their movements and imitate them on the dance floor. As might be predicted, the kids love to pinch each other.
As part of an artistic biology lesson, the students wore shirts with different designs on the front -- narrow finger-like shapes on the bellies of the boys (representing the male or "jimmy" crabs) and wide triangles on the girls (who played the female or "sook" crabs).
The plot revolves around a scientist who attends a conference about the Bay. She then falls asleep reading a report I wrote for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation called "Bad Water and the Decline of the Blue Crab in the Chesapeake Bay." (This is actually the least realistic part of the dance, because the report is a page-turner). The scientist wakes up to visions of crabs, jellyfish and white-coated researchers dancing in her head (a sort of Chesapeake "Nutcracker," just in time for the holidays).