H eart Light, says dancer/choreographer Billbob Brown, may be “the last piece I’ll ever be doing for University Dancers.” After more than two decades on the UMass Music and Dance faculty, he’s leaving to chair the dance program at the Hong Kong Academy of the Performing Arts. His piece, one of five in this weekend’s concert, sets his dancers floating in outer space to the otherworldly strains of Matt Albers’ “Song of Stars,” and tracks them with handheld video. The program’s overall title, Environs, captures an eclectic mix of style and substance under the thematic idea of what’s around us.
Special guest choreographer John Heginbotham brings his whimsical, jazzy Manhattan Research into the mix, with a score performed live by members of UMass Jazz Ensemble I. Questions of belonging and abode are at the center of Body|House, created collaboratively by guest faculty member Leslie Frye Maietta and her students, who explored “very literal and very abstract ideas of body, house, and home.” Themes of place also pervade Marilyn and Sekou Sylla’s work about Ebola, accompanied by the Bamidele Drummers, and Thomas Vacanti’s evocation of the Rocky Mountains of Utah, which “experiments with conventional ballet technique by abstracting its lines.”
Dec. 5-6, 7:30 p.m., $5-14, Bowker Auditorium, UMass Amherst, (413) 545-2511, fac.umass.edu/musicanddance.
