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Intellect

Personal histories become art in BYU Dancensemble concerts Nov. 11-12

Brigham Young University’s modern dance company DancEnsemble will perform its annual fall concert titled “History, Herstory, Ourstory” Friday and Saturday, Nov. 11-12, at 7:30 p.m. in the Dance Studio Theatre, 166 Richards Building.

Tickets are $5 and are available through the Fine Arts Ticket Office at (801) 422-4322, online at performances.byu.edu or at the door.

As a new and challenging project for DancEnsemble, the concert will portray dances exemplifying the lives of the dancers’ ancestors. With the help and tutoring of Jeff Friedman, a nationally known dance educator and founder of LEGACY Oral History Project, the company has gathered histories of their own family members through personal interviews and journals.

Through these interviews, dancers created “living” expressions and testimonies of those who have preceded them and those who are presently part of their lives. Themes that have surfaced in the interviews and choreography are relationships, love, loss and family bonds.

The project has the goal to artistically portray the dynamics of family life and offer alternate forms of fulfilling the invitation of the Old Testament prophet Malachi to turn the “heart[s] of the fathers to the children, and the heart[s] of the children to their fathers.”

For more information, contact Pat Debenham at (801) 422-3340.

Writer: Brian Rust

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