Date: Apr 09, 2007

INTERNATIONALLY ACCLAIMED GUEST DANCE ARTISTS JOIN HOFSTRA FACULTY AND STUDENTS IN THE 2007 ANNUAL SPRING DANCE CONCERT, APRIL 19 TO 22

Featuring Works by Special Visiting Professor Martha Clarke, Guest Artist Rosalind Newman and Faculty Members Stormy Brandenberger, Anita Feldman and Dyane Harvey-Salaam

Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY … Internationally acclaimed guest dance artists Martha Clarke and Rosalind Newman, and faculty members Stormy Brandenberger, Anita Feldman and Dyane Harvey-Salaam will join Hofstra University students in a beautiful array of premieres and exciting reconstructions of classic dance pieces at Hofstra University’s 2007 Annual Spring Dance Concert.

The concert will be presented April 19 to 22, 2007, at the John Cranford Adams Playhouse, South Campus. Performances take place at the John Cranford Adams Playhouse. Show times are April 19 and 20 at 8 p.m.; April 21 at 2 and 8 p.m.; and April 22 at 2 p.m.

Following the Saturday, April 21, 2 p.m. matinee, Ms. Clarke and Ms. Newman will join the faculty choreographers in an audience Q/A and discussion.

Tickets are $10, $8 for senior citizens. Members of the Hofstra community receive one free ticket upon presentation of a current HofstraCard. For tickets and more information call the Hofstra Box Office at (516) 463-6644, Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 3:45 p.m.

About Martha Clarke: Widely considered one of the most important choreographers in America, Ms. Clarke accepted an appointment from Hofstra to serve as a special visiting professor in the Department of Drama and Dance for the spring 2007 semester. She is known for her groundbreaking, visually-inspired music theater pieces.

Ms. Clarke is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (otherwise known as the “Genius Award”) and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

In 1984 Martha Clarke created a series of sketches based on the work of the 15th-century painter Hieronymus Bosch called The Garden of Earthly Delights, which received both a Drama Critics Award and the L.A. Drama Critics Award. Her 1986 piece Vienna: Lusthaus, which evokes the decadence of fin de siècle Europe, won an OBIE for best new American play.

In 1988, Ms. Clarke’s Miracolo d'amore was presented at the Spoleto Festival USA and at the New York Shakespeare Festival. Endangered Species, a work for performers and live animals, was created for Music-Theatre Group and the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1990.

Recently she directed Alice’s Adventures Underground at the Royal National Theatre in London and conceived and directed An Uncertain Hour, co-commissioned by the Nederlans Dans Theater 3, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and American Dance Festival. She conceived and directed Vers la fIamme, a dance-theater work based on short stories by Chekhov with music by Scriabin, also commissioned by Lincoln Center and ADF. In 2004 Ms. Clarke directed Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream at American Repertory Theater (ART) in Cambridge, Mass. Other projects include the theater/dance composition KAOS, based on works by Luigi Pirandello, which premiered at New York Theatre Workshop in December 2006.

Ms. Clarke was a founding member of the Pilobolus Dance Theater before beginning her own troupe, Crowsnest, in the late 1970s. Her choreography has been performed by the Nederlans Dans Theater, the Joffrey Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Rambert Dance Company and Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project.

About Rosalind Newman: An internationally acclaimed choreographer, Ms. Newman has created more than 60 works. Her original New York company, Rosalind Newman and Dancers, had major seasons in New York at the Joyce Theater and Dance Theater Workshop. The company toured the U.S. and Europe performing in many prestigious international festivals and venues such as Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival , the Paris International Dance Festival, the Holland Festival, the Dance Umbrella at Sadler’s Wells in London, and the Academy of Arts in Berlin. The company received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, NY State Council on the Arts, and various other grant organizations.

Ms. Newman is also founding artistic director and choreographer of Dance HK/NY in Hong Kong. The company enjoyed a highly successful season in Hong Kong and international tours to Taiwan and the United States, including New York. As a senior lecturer in modern dance at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, she choreographed dance ensembles that were performed in Hong Kong and then toured festivals in Korea, India, the Philippines, China, Australia, France and the U.S. She has taught widely as a guest artist at the Western Australia Academy for Performing Arts, the Rotterdam Dance Academy, the Dance Forum in Taipei, the Guangdong Modern Dance Company in China and London’s Contemporary Dance Theatre and School.

She has been recognized with a number of distinctions, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts and the Hong Kong Dance Alliance Award for choreography. Ms. Newman was course leader in the master’s graduate program in choreography at the Laban Centre in London and is presently an adjunct professor teaching composition at SUNY Purchase and the New School University in New York.

Recent commissions include a work for Dancing Wheels in Cleveland, Ohio, a company of integrated performers, including wheelchair performers, and two works to be performed this spring in Hong Kong. Her work Break/Down was performed at the TARI ’05 international dance festival in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Ms. Newman was also an artist-in-residence at the North Carolina School of the Arts for the spring 2006.