Tonight at 7:30 p.m. in Flanagan Theatre, members of Dance Ensemble/ACTivate will perform their last rendition of “Once Upon a Time Splintered.” The show is directed by Professor Celeste Miller, Theatre and Dance, and features a diverse group of performers that includes actors, athletes and dancers from multiple disciplines. It emerged from a collaborative choreography process that took shape over the course of the semester, in which Miller drew from the improvised movements of her dancers to create a cohesive performance, which centered on the concept of reframed fairy tales.
“I’m really interested as a movement and dance artist in what I call non-narrative narratives, so a fairy tale has such a perfect narrative structure. ‘Once upon a time’ gets us in, and then something happens and then they lived happily ever after,” Miller said. “We took the ‘once upon a time’ like it was a great mirror on the wall and dropped it and let it splinter and splatter, and then picked up all the little pieces of those splinterings. So I kept imagining that if we had a book of fairy tales and if they splintered and you picked up a little bit over here and it’s like ‘Oh, there was a rose,’ ‘Oh, there was a girl lost in the forest’ and then you put those two images together and see something new.”
The show’s running time is under an hour and the event is free and open to the public.
