Coming to The Conrad in La Jolla in February is Shadow Cities, the latest production by the cutting-edge contemporary dance company Ephrat Asherie Dance, in collaboration with the great Latin jazz musician and composer, GRAMMY® Award winner Arturo O’Farrill. The son of Latin jazz musician, arranger, and bandleader Chico O’Farrill, Arturo is the pianist, composer, and director for the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra.
Ephrat “Bounce” Asherie is a New York City-based director, choreographer, performer, and breakdancer, and a 2016 Bessie Award Winner for Innovative Achievement in Dance. She has received numerous awards to support her work including Dance Magazine’s Inaugural Harkness Promise Award and two National Dance Project Awards. In 2019 she was the recipient of a NYFA Fellowship and is currently a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow.
Bringing together Asherie’s innovative and rigorous choreography with O’Farrill’s singular and mesmerizing sound, Shadow Cities is a beautiful extension of Ephrat Asherie’s dedication to working with live music. With a cast of six dancers and four musicians, this work explores what it means to stay afloat in the in-between. We are split between cities, memories and generations; we are an amalgam of cultures, fully embodied and fragmented all at once; our movements are concurrently malleable and explosive, our identities fixed and infinitely fluid.
Whether as immigrants, BIPOC identities or first-generation Americans, this feeling of in-betweenness connects everyone in the work as we ask how and why – halfway between so many disparate extremes in time, space and state – we often feel our most enlivened selves. It is from this vivid place that Shadow Cities comes to life.
Shadow Cities will be performed at The Conrad’s Baker-Baum Concert Hall on February 22, at 3 PM and 7 PM. www.TheConrad.org
