Dance alums bring solo work

Amidst a flurry of theater productions so early on in the semester, the dance front at Oberlin has been rather quiet. Perhaps tonight's Alumni Dance Concert will kick things into gear, impressing on a professional level and inspiring on a home spun one. The showcase will include solo works from Sunita Amin (OC '94), Lionel Popkin (OC '91) and Andy Russ (OC '92). With such a range of styles, the program promises to be uniquely diverse.

Amin will perform a 15 minute piece entitled ncircled, a project which started its development at the American Dance Festival in 1994 and was later presented as Amorphous World in Bangalore, India, in 1996. "Many seeds, one cycle? Earth, seed tree, wind, water, woman, child, old man - all of them occupy physical shapes, but their origins and movements seem shapeless, amorphous," said Amin in describing the piece.

Amin draws from a wide range of influences, including contact improvisation, Butoh, African and modern dance. She started dancing with Bharatanatyam, an Indian classical dance form. Since her graduation only three years ago, she has been teaching dance at Centre for Learning, a small school in India. She was a member of Apoorva, a contemporary Indian dance group, and has continually been involved in dance projects for the last 4 years.

In a complete shift in theme, Popkin gives us a 20 minute performance entitled Are You Done Yet? It is set in an absurdist world in which the furniture is made entirely of newspapers. The piece explores the phenomenon of being continually bombarded with new information so that nothing is ever finished. In Lost Verses, a 10 minute scored improvisation, Popkin studies "how movement adapts when the things you count on spiral out of control."

Popkin is currently a member of the Creach/Koester Dance Company, and was also a part of Stephanie Skura's Cranky Destroyers in Seattle from 1992-1996. He is also an MFA candidate and Teaching Assistant at Bennington College in Vermont.

Finally, Andy Russ's zoom takes dance to a multimedia dimension. It is a 15-minute piece exploring the properties of human perception. It is "an investigation into the experience(s) of time-a world of shifting reference points in which one event can frame and simultaneously be framed by any other even."

Russ currently does performance work in New York City. In recent years, Russ has been Music Coordinator/Musician/Sound Engineer with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He will also be working with filmmaker Hal Hartley as a Sound Engineer this summer.

The Oberlin Alumni Dance Concert runs at Warner Main Space tonight at 8 p.m. Tickets are $2 for students, $3 for faculty, staff, alumni and senior citizens, and $4 general public.

Flight: Lionel Popkin soars.