Beacon Dance returns to the Palladium this week, with the mainstage performance on Friday, April 28, and a special Side Door jazz and dance program tonight (4-27).
Beacon is a partnership between dancers Helen Hansen French and Lauren Ree Sloan, and the Palladium. Beacon debuted in 2015 and has brought dancers from Tampa Bay and around the country to the Palladium stage.
Palladium Technical Director Christopher Spatafora, and the rest of our tech staff, work closely with the Beacon team to create the lighting design and overall look of the show.
This year live music is playing a big role in Beacon, with a jazz/dance event on Thursday night in the Side Door and a collaboration between French and jazz pianist John O’Leary on Friday night.
This annual celebration of dance continues to grow and prosper and we’re already talking about potential dates for the 2024 model.
For tickets and more information, you can follow this link.
Bill DeYoung, art writer at the St. Pete Catalyst, previewed this year’s model. You can read it here:
DANCE IN THE SPOTLIGHT
By Bill DeYoung
St. Pete Catalyst – April 26, 2023
What’s so important about Beacon, the annual dance concert at the Palladium Theater?
It’s important because it is the one and only regularly occurring presentation of original, professional dance works in the bay area, in various collaborations and forms. And it’s been that way since dancers Helen Hansen French and Lauren Ree Slone launched the first Beacon in 2015.
There are, of course, numerous dance professionals in the area, doing trailblazing work – and most if not all of them have choreographed and/or performed on the Beacon stage. Because it’s the big daddy of dance concerts.
Here’s the program for Friday’s Beacon 2023 show:
- A new work from Alexander Jones and his Project Alchemy company, set to the music of Bach
- The Dinner Table, a film project by dancer Sarah Todd Emery, who describes it as “an intimate story, told through dance and film, of love destroyed by social and political differences”
- A recreation of Heidi Brewer’s site-specific work developed for the Palladium Theater (it originated at thestudio@620)
- The St. Pete debut of Sarah Walston and Atlas Modern Ballet’s “Maelstrom”
- Helen Hansen French and pianist John O’Leary’s second collaboration, “an evocative new duet that explores memory.”
Tonight (Thursday, April 27) in the Palladium’s Side Door Cafe Jones, Project Alchemy and saxophonist Jeremy Carter (with his band) explore “Jazz Theory,” which according to Jones “explores the jazz music and dance as ritual, conjuring up sensations of the past and creating new memories to be unlocked in the future. Each song, each movement holds a history, and this event dives deeper into those curiosities of that power.”
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