The Department of Dance will present its spring concert Thursday, March 20, through Sunday, March 23, in the Robinson Hall for the Performing Arts, Belk Theater. Performances are at 7:30 p.m., Thursday through Saturday, with a 2 p.m. matinee on Sunday.
The program will feature student ensembles in works of vintage jazz, contemporary and classical ballet and contemporary dance by faculty members Gretchen Alterowitz, Karen Hubbard, Sybil Huskey, Delia Neil and Melissa Pihos.
Vintage jazz, set to music by Louis Prima, opens the program. Karen Hubbard’s “I.I.W.I.I.” jazz arrangement hearkens back to a popular dance named for the Big Apple dance club in Columbia, S.C. Delia Neil brings classical ballet to the program with two works: her choreography to an orchestral dance classic, Bartok’s “Romanian Folk Dances” and a restaging of the Act I “Pas de Trois” (trio) from the 19th-century Tchaikovsky/Petipa masterpiece “Swan Lake.”
Melissa Pihos, daughter of Philadelphia Eagles receiver and Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee Pete Pihos, will present “The Wives,” a biographical documentary dance/film piece about her father and his four wives. The music is by Arvo Part.
Gretchen Alterowitz’s contemporary ballet for 10 dancers, set to Mozart’s “Piano Concerto No. 9,” will examine concepts of beauty in ballet. The program ends with “The Waltz,” a dance theatre adaptation of Dorothy Parker’s literary work by the same title. Parker (1893-1967), a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, wrote short stories, poems and book reviews and was famous for her biting wit. Sybil Huskey’s “The Waltz” premiered in 1995 as part of an original dance and theatre collaboration about Parker called “What Fresh Hell Is This?”
Tickets are $6 for students; $9 for faculty, staff, alumni and senior citizens; and $14 for general admission.