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Guest Faculty Spring 2017 Semester

Amanda McKerrow and John Gardner
DANC 049E. Dance Repertory: Ballet
During Spring 2017 Ballet Repertory will follow the Antony Tudor Dance Studies curriculum. Students will learn and perform excerpts from Tudor's seminal ballet Dark Elegies (1937) set to Gustav Mahler's Kindertotenlieder. From tender moments of quiet devastation to careering bursts of rage, Tudor's "ballet requiem," expresses the raw emotion of a tight-knit community faced with the inexplicable loss of their beloved children. Students should be concurrently enrolled in a ballet technique class.
Prerequisite: DANC 061  or instructor permission.
0.5 credit or P.E. credit.
Wednesday   1:15pm - 4:00pm   LPAC 3

Amanda McKerrow is one of America's most acclaimed ballerinas. She has the honor of being the first American to receive a gold medal at the International Ballet Competition in Moscow in 1981. Since then she has been a recipient of numerous other awards, including the Princess Grace Foundation Dance Fellowship. Ms. McKerrow was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and began her ballet training at the age of seven at the Twinbrook School of Ballet in Rockville, Maryland. She later studied with Mary Day at the Washington School of Ballet, where she danced with the company for two years and toured extensively throughout the United States and Europe. Ms. McKerrow joined the American Ballet Theatre under the direction of Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1982, was appointed a soloist in 1983, and became a principal dancer in 1987.

John Gardner was born in Lafayette, Louisiana, and began his ballet training at age 12 with Gwen Ashton in Lafayette, and subsequently trained at the National Academy of Arts in Champagne, Illinois, under the direction of Michael Maule. He received a scholarship to the American Ballet Theatre (ABT) at the age of 16 and joined ABT's second company three months thereafter, in 1977. In 1978 he joined ABT's main company and was promoted to the rank of soloist in 1984. Mr. Gardner's diverse repertoire included many soloist and principal roles, representing an extensive range of styles and giving him the opportunity to work with some of the great ballet choreographers of the 20th century, including Antony Tudor, Jerome Robbins, Agnes DeMille, and George Balanchine. In 1991, Mr. Gardner joined Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project, affording him the opportunity to work closely with choreographers such as Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Mark Morris, Lar Lubovitch, and Martha Graham. Mr. Gardner created numerous roles during his time with the White Oak Dance Project and toured extensively in Europe, the United States, Asia, and South America. He returned to ABT in 1995, where he danced a wide variety of roles with the company until 2002.