To explore history through dance
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Less than a year into his job as chair of the UCLA department of world arts and cultures, David Rousseve will get time off from his duties to create a new work funded by a 2004 Guggenheim Fellowship in choreography.
“I’m absolutely thrilled,” Rousseve said last week. “This dance-theater piece will be the first major work I’ll develop in Los Angeles. I will perform in it, with six other L.A.-based dancer-actors. “
The work, tentatively called “Bittersweet,” will explore African American history both in itself and as a metaphor for larger life issues.
“I define ‘bittersweet’ as a moment when the greatest of tragedies and the greatest of joys might exist side by side,” Rousseve said, “as in the civil rights movement, when four young girls were killed in the bombing of a church next to the greatest advance in African American politics. It’s about the greatest of joys and the greatest of agonies, and accepting one with the other.”
Rousseve hopes to premiere the work in 2006, although he’s not sure where.
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