Benita Bike's DanceArt in Concert

About Benita Bike’s DanceArt in Concert:

Benita Bike’s DanceArt, a Los Angeles chamber modern dance company, returns to its roots with two Boston area performances at The Dance Complex in Cambridge. This program will feature the East Coast premiere of the “ME Dances” and 4 other works. “Griot Songs” references 3 stages of womanhood: child into woman, young womanhood, and maturity. “Benches” takes you into a park for a day to people watch and imagine the lives of the those you see. “Plugged” explores our relationships to the machines that occupy our world and how these machines affect our sensitivity to nature, quiet, and the earth. “Schoenfield Dances” features a rag, fughetta, shuffle, and boogie and melds 20th century popular dance styles with a classical movement sensibility.

About Benita Bike’s DanceArt:

Benita Bike’s DanceArt was established in Boston in 1980, and the Company then relocated to Los Angeles in 1990. Benita Bike served as Chair of the Boston Dance Alliance and taught for many years at her downtown Boston studio and at Boston Center for Adult Education. Benita Bike’s DanceArt has performed throughout the US and abroad. The Company’s work is known for its musicality, elegance, and expressivity. Benita makes sensitive observations on life employing expressive gesture, evocative contemporary movement, and an architectural use of space.

Kathryn Boland of Dance Informa Magazine wrote: “I am a classicist,” wrote Benita Bike in her program letter. I did indeed see classicism in her work, but also evident were many modern/postmodern elements — release into gravity within movement, inventive aesthetic choices, and unique structural approaches. Sometimes postmodern work can be conceptually and intellectually meaningful, yet the audience experience of taking it in isn’t as pleasurable. Classical work can be aesthetically very pleasurable, but lack conceptual substance. In this show, Ms. Bike’s work had both strengths…With a classical grounding, yet a modern daring, Benita Bike’s Dance Art was an insightful blending of many elements — leaving my eyes, my mind and my heart quite content.”