ARENA Dances

ARENA Dances closes out its 14th Season in the Twin Cities. The company will perform Open Eyes April 8-11, 2010 at The LAB Theater (formerly the Guthrie Lab) in the warehouse district of downtown Minneapolis

Open Eyes will premiere a women’s sextet, a Twin Cities favorite- Quartet, an amazing solo to toy piano, two duets with an excerpt from UGLY and the return of Amy Behm Thomson to dance with Mathew Janczewski, and finally the full company work, RETURN, from 2000.

The show opens with Quartet, a ruckus work that delights audiences with the high-energy of the dancers and driving music of Fourtet. Quartet premiered in Northfield, MN in 2005, quickly followed by our tenth anniversary concert in 2006 and has since been performed in Morris, MN, Kalamazoo, MI, New York City, and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Next on the program is Open Eyes, premiered in 2004, it marks the return of Mathew Janczewski’s muse, Amy Behm Thomson in a duet for the two of them to the music of Yo-Yo Ma. Rounding out the first half of the program is RETURN, created in 1999 and first performed in 2002; it is a full company work to the original music of Scott Killian.

The audience then gets a youthful 1998 work by Mathew with the intimate solo, Kept, by long-time ARENA dancer Stephen Schroeder to toy piano. Closing out the program is the premiere of the women’s sextet, Divine Intuition. Mathew is playing with the beauty, power, passion, and physicality of the ARENA women with an eclectic range of music by local great Michelle Kinney with JelloSlave, massive attack, David Hirschfelder, and MGMT!

The Spring Season is made possible with support by the McKnight Foundation and “in the ARENA” FRIENDS.

Community Outreach: The matinee held on Friday April 12th will include approximately 200 students attending. The matinee will include a performance of the work created with the Rosemount High School in conjunction with the Minnesota Shubert Center’s Educational Outreach Program’s Choreographic Residency and will conclude with a question and answer session as well as dance classes taught at all schools.