MARY CARBONARA DANCES PRESENTS
WORLD PREMIERE OF THE BEGGAR’S TABLE
JUNE 8-11, 2005 AT ODC THEATER

Company’s fourth season will also include excerpts from the highly-acclaimed 2004 work, Deflecting Faith.

For tickets, call 415/863-9834 or visit www.odctheater.org

March 24, 2005 – SAN FRANCISCO, CA – Mary Carbonara Dances today announced the company’s fourth annual home season June 8-11, 2005 at ODC Theater (3153 – 17th Street) in San Francisco. The highlight of the season will be the world premiere of The Beggar’s Table, a work exploring the fine line between having enough to get by and not having enough to get off the street. The company will also perform excerpts from Deflecting Faith (2004), which the San Francisco Chronicle called, “ a work of quiet integrity rather than flashy ambition, and one you process as much with your heart as with your mind." The San Francisco Bay Guardian added, “[Deflecting] Faith is a great dance piece…. The power of the performance and its ability to touch an audience were equally vast." Mary Carbonara Dances is presented in part by ODC Theater’s Verge Residency Program.

Choreographed by Artistic Director Mary Carbonara, The Beggar’s Table is a work for the seven dancers of the company with an original score by composer Peter V. Swendsen, lighting design by José María Francos and costumes by Heidi Schweiker. Carbonara explains that the idea for The Beggar’s Table came more from a discomfort than an inspiration. “I’m both troubled and curious about the dividing line between people who manage to make ends meet -- thrive even -- and those who don’t, sometimes ending up living on the street,” she says. Carbonara goes on to ask, “What keeps some people on one side of that line and the rest on the other and what happens when that line is crossed?” With homelessness a familiar fact of Bay Area living, the question remains: what leaves some of us on the street and affords the rest of us the ability to walk by?

Also on the program will be excerpts from Deflecting Faith (2004) for six dancers, choreographed by Carbonara with a score by Swendsen, lighting design by María Francos and costumes by James Meyer. The work is motivated by the choreographer’s own questions about faith, about how it is obtained and focused, and about what we choose to put our faith in – religion, humankind, love, ourselves, another person. Is it possible to live without faith of any kind? It can be said that our beliefs are of our own choosing, as are our disbeliefs. If so, what takes hold from the very things we attempt to deflect?

The dancers of the company are Greta Jorgensen, Mathew Holland, Never Navarro, Jennifer Perfilio, Laura Sadai, Laura Sharp and Angelina Vasile.

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