W&L Dancers Explore Human Emotions
The Washington and Lee Repertory Dance Company will perform in “W&L Dancers Create…” this week at the Lenfest Center.
Performances will be Thursday and Friday, Nov. 13-14, at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, Nov. 15, at 2 p.m. Presented by the Department of Theater, Dance and Film Studies, the hour-long evening concert, under the artistic direction of professor Jenefer Davies, will be comprised of work choreographed by guest artists and students, and will explore contemporary modern movement practices and the aesthetics of expression and abstraction. Choreographer Megan Gargano, founder of The Movement Project, was in residence with W&L dancers and created “a meditation on transition, memory, and internal landscapes.” Titled “Waypoint,” her choreographic work explores the quiet thresholds we cross in search of direction and belonging. The Movement Project is a professional dance company committed to fostering the next generation of Ohio artists through the development of sustainable and equitable practices for dance professionals.
Directed and choreographed by Cassie Wang, “The Head is not the Star of the Body” is a choreographic study on longing. Wang and her collaborators ground themselves in the questions: How does longing reveal identity?; How do we sit with someone else’s longing?; How do we measure the distance between subjects of longing?
In process and in performance, this work aims to cultivate mutual understanding of self and other. Wang, a Bostonbased professional choreographer, developed this eveninglength work in residency at the Boston Center of the Arts Jane Harrington, visiting assistant professor of English, will discuss her new book, “Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance: The Forgotten Founding Mothers of the Fairy Tale and the Stories That They Spun,” at Washington and Lee University at 12:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 13, in the Houston H. Harte Center Gallery in Leyburn Library. The talk is free and open to the public, and copies of the book will be available for purchase.
W&L Professor To Discuss New Book ‘Women Of The Fairy Tale Resistance’
The lecture is sponsored by the Department of English, the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program and the University Library and is part of the University Library’s Anne and Edgar Basse Jr. Author Talk series, which invites W&L faculty to showcase their scholarship to the campus community. The Basse series is made possible by the Anne W. and Edgar A. Basse Jr. (’39) Endowment, which was created in 1988 to support the varied activities of the University Library Special Collections & Archives.
“Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance” resurrects the 17th-century salon writers who launched the first fairy tale craze with feminist, gender- bending tales that challenged kings and convention. In conversation with W&L English majors Nora Jacobson ’26 and Kaitlin Silva ’28, Harrington will share the origins of the project and the twists of her research journey, and will read from the biographies and retellings that make up the work.
Harrington said that when she first started teaching fairy tale course content at W&L, she dug into sources she hadn’t before and discovered a group of popular and prolific women writers in 17thcentury Paris who started the public popularity for fairy tales, even coining the term, contes de fees.
“In my research, I soon learned these women wrote scads of tales, all of which did prominently feature fairies and female protagonists who were not at all like the weak or submissive princesses of the canon,” Harrington said. “And the more I learned about the writers themselves — that they were considered ‘unruly women’ by King Louis XIV — the more I wanted to revive their stories for modern readers. So began the quest that would result in this book.”
This is Harrington’s ninth year teaching at W&L. Her debut novel, “In Circling Flight” (2022), was the winner of the Brighthorse Book Prize and longlisted for the Crook’s Corner Book Prize.
