SUNDAY APRIL 28
6:30 PM AND 8:30 PM LANG
PERFORMING ARTS CENTER TROY DANCE LAB (LPAC 002)
hello!
Thank you for coming to tonight's show.
Please take a walk around the space before finding your seat.
Due to the volume and intensity of taiko drums, if you are wearing hearing aids, you may want to lower or adjust them prior to the show. If you have sensitive hearing there are also disposable earplugs at the door; please talk to an usher.
The use of flash photography is strictly prohibited as it is dangerous to the dancers and distracting for other audience members. We appreciate your understanding and cooperation.
Table of Contents
SARUS CRANE, DO YOU MISS HOME?
THE DANCERS
THE CHOREOGRAPHER
A NOTE FROM THE CHOREOGRAPHER ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
LPAC AND PRODUCTION TEAM CREDITS
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE DANCE PROGRAM
UPCOMING PERFORMANCES
SARUS CRANE, DO YOU MISS HOME?
Director: Liya Chang '24
Choreography and Taikography: Liya Chang '24, Keira Dandy, Myles Farrall '24, Emily Lathers, Dart Macveagh, Finn Verdonk
Performers: Keira Dandy, Myles Farrall '24, Emily Lathers, Dart Macveagh, Finn Verdonk
Costume Design: Liya Chang '24
Lighting Design: Max Winig '24
A friend once told me that graduating is a little bit like dying. I made this dance to prove him wrong.
This is a dance about crawling out of the long and forlorn dark. About squeezing through tight spaces and bruising your knees. About losing things, finding them, losing them, finding them, losing them again—
This is a dance the thesis of which amounts to: you get to keep everything you’ve ever loved for even a fraction of a moment.
If you don’t believe me, come see it. We’ll show you.
A work of taiko, modern dance, theater, and poetry.
THE DANCERS
Keira Dandy
Emily Lathers
Emily Lathers
Keira Dandy
Myles Farrall
Dart Macveagh
Finn Verdonk
Keira Dandy
THE DANCERS
Keira Dandy
Emily Lathers
Myles Farrall
Finn Verdonk
Dart Macveagh
Finn Verdonk
Myles Farrall
Myles Farrall
THE DANCERS
Keira Dandy (she/they)
favorite bird: king penguin
least favorite bird: woodpecker
if you had to be completely horizontal or completely vertical for the rest of your life, which, and why?:
horizontal— I love being flat on the floor and sleeping, although not at the same time.
one thing you’re not scared of: dogs
Keira (in-the-market-for-a-nickname) Dandy is a movement artist and who enjoys wriggling on the floor, partnering, hitting drums, handstands and pushups with dance friends in underhill library, sci-fi and fantasy novels, dnd, knitting, and being in all the choreography of her incredibly cool friends. They are a junior currently studying dance, linguistics, and computer science at Swarthmore College.
Myles Farrall (he/him)
Favorite Bird: Kookaburra
Least Favorite Bird: Seagull
if you had to be completely horizontal or completely vertical for the rest of your life, which, and why?:
Definitely completely vertical- bathroom
one thing you're not afraid of: People under 5'2"
Myles is majoring in Asian Studies, with a minor in Chinese. When he was a small boy, he hit a drum for the first time, and he's followed that sound ever since. If you ever find him not doing that, please feed him an orange and bonk him on the head.
Emily Lathers
THE DANCERS
favorite bird: puffin
least favorite bird: mockingbirds when they are mean to other birds
if you had to be completely horizontal or completely vertical for the rest of your life, which, and why?: neither, diagonal!
one thing you’re not scared of: peeing in the dark studying: history and dance emily thinks more people should be less afraid to make weird art
Dart Macveagh (they/them)
favorite bird: Penguin
least favorite bird: I’m not sure! I haven’t met them all, I don’t want to be reductive.
if you had to be completely horizontal or completely vertical for the rest of your life, which, and why?: vertical, im pretty sure you can learn to sleep standing up. one thing you’re not scared of: The sunset.
Hi! I’m Dart, I’m a dancer. I am so grateful to be a part of this piece! I met Liya in a philosophy class which taught us both that philosophy is not really for us. My favorite motion in this dance is the construction of the tall creature. Hopefully you’ll know it when you see it. Enjoy!
THE DANCERS
Finn Verdonk (any pronouns)
favorite bird: Roseate Spoonbill
least favorite bird: Turkey
if you had to be completely horizontal or completely vertical for the rest of your life, which, and why?: Probably horizontal. I'm imagining I'd turn into a sort of hovercraft.
one thing you’re not scared of: being a Public Nuisance
Today, Finn saw a balloon. What balloon did you see today? Please tell him about it after the show.
THE CHOREOGRAPHER
Liya Chang (they/them)
favorite bird: chicken
least favorite bird: chicken if you had to be completely horizontal or completely vertical for the rest of your life, which, and why?: horizontal, for ease of transportation one thing you’re not scared of: god height: 164 cm width: 2 in
Liya is interested in hope.
赤頸鶴想家嚒
A note from the choreographer
What are you afraid of?
I’m afraid of dropping my phone into the toilet. I’m afraid of leaning too far over the railing in a high place and falling over the edge. I’m afraid my arms will give out when I’m lifting someone, and that they’ll get hurt.
I think about the things that scare me every day. I think a lot of us do. We’re a funny generation in that way. We grew up crawling around in the grass and eating dirt and mushing Silly Putty into globs in our hands until it was covered in hair and grime and then the internet exploded and suddenly I could play Donut Maker on my mom’s iPod Touch for twenty minutes if I behaved well in the car, suddenly every wall was a window and you could see everything from one end of the world to the other.
We all know the story. For a while it was good. Now it’s like, I see that the world is burning. But I have to eat and drink and piss and sleep, or I’ll die.
What are you afraid of? I’m afraid of graduating. I’m afraid that I’ll lose the drive and discipline that has propelled me through the last four years. I’m afraid of moving to another country, again, and starting from scratch: knowing no one, getting on the wrong train.
赤頸鶴想家嚒
A note from the choreographer
During spring break I went to a friend’s apartment for dinner one evening. As we were hanging out in her room at one a.m. and she was telling me about her old love of greenhouses and how she had to give it up to come here, how now she only built things in video games, I opened my mouth and mumbled something about how I don’t think we ever really lose the things we love, we just grow bigger around the new things that show up so there’s space enough to hold all of them. I was full of stew and quite gassy and in twenty minutes I was going to take the nastiest poop of my life. The fairy lights in her room were the Christmas-y kind with the rainbow colors, and there was a tapestry on one wall. After I’d finished mumbling whatever the hell I said, she was quiet for a long while. She turned to look at me with eyes like headlights blazing through the dark, her mouth opening as if to say something—
Then our friend said hey do you guys wanna see me beat this last level, so we did that. Another time, after a Wednesday rehearsal, Emily, Myles, and I were lying around in Troy procrastinating on becoming vertical. I was yapping about Sarus crane as I am wont to do if you leave me alone for more than five minutes and trying to explain why the ending couldn’t be cut and clean and it couldn’t
赤頸鶴想家嚒
A note from the choreographer
just be like, we did the thing, everything is great now. There was a moment after my last spiel (out of like fifteen) where Emily blinked at me in that particular way they have that’s like sixteen kinds of birds scrambled into one guy. I think I have an idea of what you’re trying to say, they said in a voice like rivers carving their way across dry land.
They said what we are doing is worthwhile even if it is very small and I jumped up and smashed my head into the ceiling from the sheer force of my excitement saying YES, YES, YES—
What we are doing is worthwhile even if it is very small. The world is burning and there are ten million eight hundred and seventy-two things to be afraid of and what we are doing is worthwhile, even if it is so, so small. Even if it is buying a yogurt for a friend. Even if it is driving someone to the pharmacy who doesn’t have time to take the bus. Even if it is letting a friend lean their head on your shoulder after a long day for ten minutes, because every small thing you do is a star wrapped in the palms of your hands that you give to someone and they get to keep it for the rest of their life. We get to keep our blessings. No matter how far we travel, no matter if we graduate and get on a plane and wind up in the countryside in
赤頸鶴想家嚒
A note from the choreographer
Italy or a small village in rural Taiwan or wherever the hell the rest of us are thinking of going, wherever the hell the Class of 2024 is going to wind up, we get to keep the love that we are given.
That’s why the dancers are able to leave at the end of Sarus crane, even though each of them starts out scared and disoriented and unwilling to budge an inch from where they’re standing. Even though we built their characters around fear, around the base notion that fear stops you from moving forward and locks your hands and knees and feet in place. Because when all is said and done, when the snow has finished falling, they know that:
One: Someone will keep playing even after they’re gone and
Two: the whole world is waiting for them on the other side of the door.
-L
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
None of this would have been possible without the following people. In no particular order: I am grateful to my thesis advisors, Professor Lingyuan Maggie Zhao and Professor Joe Small for their patience, wisdom, and support throughout the semester. I am grateful to my mother, Lim Choong Geok, for hyping up the first draft of the poster even though it was not good and for reminding me to go to bed every night from the other side of the globe. I am grateful to my boss, Jeremy Polk, for the help with Adobe Premiere Pro as well as the bones and I am grateful to the lovely ladies at Trinity Thrift Shop (open two Fridays a month!), from whom I purchased various clothes for costumes.
I am grateful to Ark Lu for translating my fuzzy title idea into Mandarin, and I am grateful to Lucas Liu for translating Ark Lu’s Mandarin title into English. I am grateful to Rain White for ferrying Lucas’s messages about translation back and forth via iMessage like a goddess on Heely’s, for driving me two hours to pick up my laptop in March, and for complimenting the soles of my feet. I am also grateful to Lucas Liu for ordering costumes from Taobao; I am terrified of third-party shipping websites and could not have done it alone.
I am grateful to Gabby Nash, Max Winig ‘24, Moss Wacker, Dart Macveagh, Keira Dandy, and Sasha Casada ‘24 for being part of my spring ‘23 Dance
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Lab II piece, YOU’VE NEVER SEEN A SKY SO ENORMOUS (and you’ve never seen a guy with such a fondness for uppercase letters), and for sharing themselves with me so candidly and helping me realize that I was capable of choreographing ensemble work. I am also grateful to them for occasionally bringing up The Horse and reminding me that weird art lives on in the hearts of people, even if the only thought that went into it at the time was “Max said they wanted to be a horse so it certainly should happen.” SARUS CRANE would not have been born had I not struggled through the process of creating ENORMOUS SKY.
I am grateful to Gary from Sharples with the golf visor hat for always being there after Saturday Taiko rehearsals to chat. I am grateful to Linda and Donna and Rosemarie and Carol and all the other wonderful ladies at Sharples for humoring my talk about chickens as a metaphor for how tired I am on any given day for four years. I am grateful to the one redhead with sideburns and glasses who always lets me know if something is vegan as well as vegetarian and for saying to me today, when I told him that I felt like a chicken strapped to the back of a U-Haul, that I was the first chicken that had learned to fly.
I am grateful to Professor Ellen Gerdes for teaching my first Dance Studies class and introducing me to a world of form and function that exist in harmony or disharmony. I am grateful to Professor
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Kyle Clark for reminding me, week after week, to take care of myself and not do anything stupid even as the weather gets warmer and for talking about driving through the woods with broken headlights at 3:24 a.m. and coaxing us into realizing that, even if you don’t know where you’re going, you just have to go somewhere. I am grateful to Professor Pallabi Chakravorty for reminding me that all dance has meaning and that all dance is dance, and illuminating the myriad of ways in which we can begin to create those meanings in our own work.
I am grateful to Professor Craig Williamson for being so generous in his support of my writing and for encouraging me to keep pursuing it in whatever form compels me, and for the brief, but lovely conversations we’ve had over the years on the stairs down to the LPAC basement. I am grateful to Professor Buyun Chen for teaching FYS: The Global History of Science and Premodern China, two classes which deepened my understanding of the world that we have inherited and gave me the conviction to keep investigating, to keep wondering, and to keep asking hard questions.
I am grateful to my dancers for their bravery, wit, and strength of heart. For opening up to me briefly in a google form in January and allowing me to write stories that centered those parts of themselves. For being open to all sorts of ridiculous things like memorizing lines and forming vertically intimidating
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
structures and, above all, dancing while acting. Dancing as characters as people as versions of themselves in another life, as depictions of life itself. I am grateful to my modern-trained dancers for their openness to working with taiko, and I am grateful to Myles Farrall ‘24 for letting me throw him around in modern dance warm-up exercises.
I am grateful to the members of Swarthmore Taiko Ensemble this semester for allowing me to take recordings of them for the pre-show segment.
I am grateful to Myles Farrall ‘24, Emily Lathers, and Keira Dandy for yapping with me about SARUS CRANE into the night. I am grateful to Myles Farrall ‘24 and Finn Verdonk for saying no. I am grateful to Emily Lathers for being willing to put on the most ridiculous costumes in the name of Art. I am grateful to Dart Macveagh for listening to me wax lyrical about the narrative of the piece before Spring break and suggesting to me that perhaps their section should be a solo (they were correct). I am grateful to Keira Dandy for being the strongest, funniest, and most thoughtful fast dog, for always knowing how to part the ocean to allow the rest of the world through.
I am grateful to Myles Farrall ‘24 for graduating with me and carrying our feelings of joy and fear and deep, frow-burrowing concern into rehearsal with me each week. As seniors, that is, senior citizens, the world of Swarthmore acquires a quality of transience
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
that you don’t really see until you’re standing by the exit, waiting for your turn to leave. I am grateful to Myles for believing in this piece from the start and for working tirelessly and endlessly with me to craft it into the work that it is today. I am also grateful to Myles for his support and guidance in writing the finale, being as he is, famously, the Ultimate Beatmaster.
I am grateful to all of my friends, who I will try to name but will definitely miss some of due to severe lack of sleep. I am grateful to Ayla Radha for bearing with my bad pick-up lines. I am grateful to Griffin Moore for believing in the Litzio in me and for the warmest, tightest hugs. I am grateful to Max Winig ‘24 for spending hours and hours this past week riding the Genie across Troy for the sake of my lighting requests, and for asking me once if by chicken I meant the animal or the food. I am grateful to Jessie Paisley ‘24 for her persistent, star-like presence and for reminding me at the start of the semester that as seniors this spring we should, and deserve to, have fun. I am grateful to Min Fruman ‘24 for the gains, for their heart, for the hours spent lying around in their room howling like pixelated 2009 clipart of wolves. I am grateful to all the taiko youth for their spirit and their joy; it’s lovely— you’re all lovely.
I am grateful to those who came before: to Quincy Ponvert and Koji Flynn-Do who graduated last year but whose presence in the studio persists like the
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
spirit of a small victorian child. I am grateful to everyone I met at the East Coast Taiko Conference hosted by Gendo Taiko for showing me how far taiko can go, which is to say, as far as you want it to go. I am grateful to my friends at the media center who recycled 35x48 posters they messed up— thank you for the scrolls of planning paper. I am grateful to everyone at Taikoz in Sydney, Australia, for the ten weeks during which they showed us what it looks like to train, sweat, and perform with a professional taiko ensemble.
I am grateful to Bethany Formica Bender for teaching Modern I my sophomore fall semester and convincing me not to stop dancing forever, but rather to keep dancing forever. I am grateful to Bethany Formica Bender for holding her ground (and what good ground it is!) that everyone can dance and that everyone will dance in her classes. I am grateful to Bethany Formica Bender for wishing the best for me first as a person, and second as a dancer. I am able to take care of myself now largely because of you.
Finally, I am grateful to Joe Small for letting me play set for Lion Chant during my first semester in Swarthmore Taiko Ensemble even though my technique was astonishing in its nonexistence and my attitude was earnest, confused, and frankly a little cocky.
I am grateful to Joe Small, also, for letting me join the Kizuna Dance in Collaboration Cooper the following semester, long after the rest of the student perform-
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
-ers had already put in 4 months of work and for reading my very long email asking to do so. I am grateful to Joe Small for sharing taiko with me and letting me find my own way into this vast and beautiful world.
Thank you to everyone I have ever met at this college who I wasn’t able to list in this section, regardless of if we have spoken once, twice, or a thousand times over the last four years. The person I was when I first started college would not have been able to make SARUS CRANE. They would have made DOMESTICATED PIGEON. And that would have been a very different piece of work.
Thank you, truly. I am grateful in ways that words cannot describe.
LPAC AND PRODUCTION TEAM
CREDITS
Director of the Lang Performing Arts Center:
James Murphy
Manager of Operations: Thomas Snyder
Production Stage Manager: Brady Gonsalves
Lighting Supervisor: Dominic Chacon
Live Stream Manager: Jeff Bagg
Stage Manager: Max Winig '24
Lightboard Op: Max Winig '24
Costume Shop Manager: LeVonne Lindsay
Photography: Vaidehee Durgude
Poster Design: Liya Chang '24
Program Design: Liya Chang '24
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE
DANCE PROGRAM
PALLABI CHAKRAVORTY
Stephen Lang Professor of Performing Arts
OLIVIA SABEE
Associate Professor (Chair, Fall 2023)
JOSEPH SMALL
Associate Professor (Chair, Spring 2024)
KYLE CLARK
Visiting Assistant Professor
ELLEN GERDES
Visiting Assistant Professor
LINGYUAN ZHAO
Visiting Assistant Professor and Faculty Production Manager
CHANDRA MOSS-THORNE Senior Lecturer
JEANNINE OSAYANDE Senior Lecturer
BETHANY FORMICA BENDER Lecturer
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE DANCE PROGRAM
AQEEL BHATTI
Associate in Performance
JENNIFER CHIPMAN BLOOM
Associate in Performance
SHIVA DAS
Associate in Performance
MACCONNELL EVANS
Associate in Performance
MEREDITH RAINEY
Associate in Performance
WESLEY RAST
Associate in Performance
DARRELL WILLIAMS
Associate in Performance
SUSAN GROSSI
Administrative Coordinator
LORRAINE ANDERSON
Costume Assistant for Dance
UPCOMING PERFORMANCES
Spring Dance Concert
Friday May 3rd, 4:30 PM
Saturday May 4th, 7:00 PM
Lang Performing Arts Center
Pearson-Hall Theatre
Free and Open to the Public
Dance Lab Showing
Monday, May 6th, 5:00 PM
Lang Performing Arts Center
Troy Dance Studio, LPAC002
Free and Open to the Public
If you are a student interested in dance-making, please consider the Dance Program's Dance Lab class series this coming Fall '24 semester, starting with DANC011 Dance Lab I (1.0, HU credit). No prior experience in dance necessary!
In case of emergency, please seek the LPAC or house staff for assistance and instructions.
Swarthmore College encourages persons with disabilities to participate in programs and activities. If you anticipate needing any type of accommodations or have questions about the physical access provide, please contact the event sponsor or Susan Smythe, ADA Program Manager, at 610-690-2063 in advance of your participation or visit
Evacuation Notice:
In the event of an EMERGENCY, please exit the theater through the nearest lighted exit, and then leave the building via the closest marked exit, including, if necessary, alarmed emergency exit doors.
If you have a disability and might require assistance with evacuation, please make yourself known to an usher or other staff member, and let them know what help you need.
In the event of an evacuation, if you see someone who might need assistance leaving the area, please either offer help yourself or alert a staff member to that person’s location.
