New and Recent Screendances by Peter Sparling Special guests: RusCa Piano Duo: Ilya Blinov and Christian Matijas-Mecca- Pianos, Ralph Williams, and Vince Castagnacci Thurnau Professor of Dance Peter Sparling presents four new and recent screendances, works featuring his own dance performance for the camera and edited specifically for the screen. Joining him on screen and for live performance are Ralph Williams, UM Prof. of English, Christian Matijas-Mecca, UM Prof. of Dance and pianist Ilya Blinov, Susquehanna University. Inspired by the poetry of T. S. Eliot and Shakespeare and the music of Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten and Igor Stravinsky, the works represent a culmination of Sparling’s 40-year career as dancer/choreographer and more recent transition from stage to screen. He Was Locked in a Race Against Time takes a radical departure from the over 200 dance productions created to Stravinsky’s monumental 1913 score, Le Sacre de Printemps. Sparling’s screendance features Stravinsky’s original arrangement for piano four-hands, performed by Christian Matijas-Mecca and Ilya Blinov. Their performance provides an intimate scale, a striking counterpoint to the rhythms of the movement and editing, and a nod to the tradition of keyboard music accompaniment for silent film. Sparling’s work tracks a man’s turbulent, soulful journey across four lives, and through four distinct landscapes that are both inner and outer. Day Tripper finds him rising fitfully from his rocking chair to stumble through his suburban neighborhood as if negotiating a confused daydream. In Uncommon Night, he dances spellbound under a full moon. Priest’s Dance reveals a turbulent soul just beneath a monk’s somber composure. Bedlam, shot in the empty, decrepit Traverse City State Mental Hospital, evokes the final undoing of a lost man. Last Man at Willow Run is an elegiac tone poem for the post-industrial age, shot in the Willow Run Bomber Plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan just months before its demolition. A lone figure (Sparling) maps the cavernous spaces of the abandoned plant with his dancing body. The camera charts his progress down mile-long corridors, as he wrestles with forgotten spirits and is cloned into assembly lines of workers past. Set to Richard Strauss\&##39;s dramatic orchestral score, Death and Transfiguration, the work has a tragic, ironic edge while serving as an epic-scale memorial. In The Death of St. Narcissus, Sparling splits his screen persona between that of narrator and Narcissus in this danced dramatization of T.S. Eliot’s vivid, homoerotic mash-up of a St. Sebastian-like martyr and the doomed figure from Greek mythology. Shot against greenscreen, the work features paintings of Elyse Radenovic as sets and backdrops and the voice of tenor Nicholas Phan performing Benjamin Britten’s haunting setting of the Eliot poem. Ralph Williams, beloved UM professor and renowned scholar, is the inspiration for Sparling’s Six Sonnets. Sparling dances solos, duets and trios to readings by Williams of Shakespeare sonnets, set against the evocative drawings and paintings of UM Thurnau Prof. Emeritus of Art & Design, Vince Castagnacci.