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Widening the Circle

By Fellow Travelers Performance Group

Created by Cynthia Adams, Artistic Director Fellow Travelers Performance Group

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Funny and whimsical, dark and emotive, and invariably thought provoking, “Widening the Circle” blurs the edge of dance and theater with spoken word, movement, multi-media and audience participation.
The creators say this show is appropriate for ages 12-15 and up
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Fri 08/02 8:30 PM

Pre-sale closed Online sales end at 11:59pm the day before the show, or when 70% of the house is sold.

Sun 08/04 4:00 PM

Pre-sale closed Online sales end at 11:59pm the day before the show, or when 70% of the house is sold.

Wed 08/07 5:30 PM

Pre-sale closed Online sales end at 11:59pm the day before the show, or when 70% of the house is sold.

Sat 08/10 10:00 PM

Pre-sale closed Online sales end at 11:59pm the day before the show, or when 70% of the house is sold.

Sun 08/11 7:00 PM

Pre-sale closed Online sales end at 11:59pm the day before the show, or when 70% of the house is sold.

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Reviews for: Widening the Circle


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Video Trailer
Cast and Crew
Cynthia Adams
Producer, Choreographer, performer
Cynthia Adams is a dance-theater choreographer, poet, and movement educator whose choreography is informed by the German Tanztheatre style, modern and postmodern dance, and avant-garde theater. At the juncture of dance and theater Cynthia Adams, Artistic Director of Fellow Travelers Performance Group creates whimsical yet pushy choreography, blending movement and spoken word into thought provoking playful collages. Her dance theater pieces invite audience members to join the performers on a journey into worlds inspired by women’s issues, climate change, and other current political themes. “Their (FTPG’s) work is smart, idiosyncratic, and carefully crafted. When they use a prop, it’s exactly tailored to the work in question. They know not only how to use text but also how to project it. Irony and wit, staples in their toolbox, are used to explore and illuminate matters of the heart.” Rita Felciano Fellow Travelers Performance Group (FTPG) was formed in 1992 in the San Francisco Bay Area, now solely under the Artistic Direction of Cynthia Adams. FTPG became known to expect the unexpected with concept driven, witty choreography exploring the surreal nature of human experience. FTPG has performed nationally and internationally in festivals including the 2023 Dumbo Dance Festival in May 2023 in Brooklyn, NY and the West Wave Festival, Dancing on the Edge Festival, Vancouver, Canada; Yerba Buena Gardens Choreographers Festival, House Special (2002); Oakland Arts Festival, and others. FTPG has received numerous grants and residencies, most recently a J.W. Fisher Endowed Arts Outreach Fund (2024) and a Creative Catalyst Project Grant from the Iowa Arts Council (2023). In 2028 Ms. Adams received the CHIME grant (Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange) from the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. Cynthia performed with many other choreographers including Kei Takei’s Moving Earth and Li Chiao-Ping Dance. Cynthia’s inquiry in human movement has led to somatic practices and the mind/body connection. Cynthia completed a Masters in Choreography/ Performance from the U.C.L.A. Cynthia is nationally certified to teach in both Pilates and yoga and is a Yoga Alliance Continuing Education Provider (YACEP) and certified as a BioMechanics Method Corrective Exercise Specialist. Ms. Adams is currently an Associate Teaching Professor in Dance at Iowa State University in the Department of Kinesiology. As full time Associate Teaching Professor of dance in the Kinesiology Department at Iowa State University. A lifelong learner of mindful movement practices Cynthia loves helping people find their own joy in moving and creating freely.
Paula McArthur
Dancer
Paula McArthur is owner/director of Des Moines DanzArts Studio which she opened in 2011. She has over 30 years of teaching with experience and versatility in teaching many forms of dance. Her range of expertise includes modern, ballet, jazz, tap, ballroom, Latin, creative preschool movement, improvisation, and body conditioning. She taught dance for 17 years for the musical theater department at Drake University; and has also taught for Penn State University and Iowa State University. For over a decade she was the Associate Director for the School of Classical Ballet & Dance and has taught for other schools: Vine Street Ballet, Ballet Iowa, The Dance Place, Central Iowa Dance Central Pennsylvania Dance Workshop, Edmunds Art Academy and Co Motion Dance Theatre. She has worked extensively as an artist in residence within the public schools Paula is a founding member of "Hurley and Dancers" amd continues to perform for them along with choreographer Cynthia Adams (Fellow Travelers Group). DanzArts is proud to be the rehearsal home for these Iowa based companies. Additional companies she has worked for: Pennsylvania Dance Theater, Sandance, Neuman Project and choreographer Shawn Womack Ms McArthur began her professional carrer in ballet, performing with the Des Moines Ballet. she also trained at the Joffrey Ballet School in NYC and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School in Canada . Ms McArthur earned her BFA from ISU where she turned her attention to modern dance. She was honored with both the Anna R. Toman and Charlotte Wilkason awards from ISU. She continued her study at the Bates Dance festivals, Doug Varone intensives and summer programs at NYU. Since becoming a modern dancer she has worked, trained and/or performed for such choreographers and companies as Bill T. Jones, Bill Young, Doug Elkins, Doug Varone, David Dorfmann, Claire Porter, Kathleen Hermsdorf, Michael Foley, Tony Coray, Kevin Wynn, Ben Munisteri, Joanna Mendl Shaw, Ron K. Brown, Rennie Harris, Larry Keigwin and jazz with Cathy Young.
Michaela Finnegan
Performer
Rachel Tucker
Performer
Rachel is a Twin Cities native and has been dancing for 20 years, spanning a range of styles including ballet, modern, jazz, and hip-hop. She completed a dance minor at Iowa State University, where she was an active member of the student organization Orchesis I Dance Company, serving as president her final year. Outside of dance, Rachel works in the environmental field and sells handmade beaded earrings at local craft fairs.
Kat Culbertson
Dancer
Kat has been dancing for 18 years, primarily modern and contemporary styles. She was a student director of the Dance Collective at the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities for 4 years. These days she works as a clinic assistant at Planned Parenthood and enjoys connecting with the dance community at Zenon Dance School and elsewhere in her free time.
More Information

Widening the Circle, created by Fellow Travelers Performance Group Artistic Director Cynthia Adams and performed by Cynthia Adams and Paula McArthur.

Check out the wonderful review:

By Rohan Preston

Star Tribune

August 5, 2024 at 12:30PM
 

'Widening the Circle’

This piece by Des Moines-based Fellow Travelers Performance Group leans into the sociopolitical moment with heart and wit. Through a series of theatrical dances interlaced with video projections, performers Cynthia Adams and Paula McArthur sit, glide and dart across the stage, moving with honest, emotive elegance to spoken word and music.

In truth, a work that is so open about its concerns for the fate of the Earth, women’s rights and the rash of school shootings, to name a few of its themes, is not supposed to be so engaging. But through their charisma, Adams, artistic director of Fellow Travelers, and McArthur, owner of Des Moines’ DanzArt Studio, win us over. The two have an easy chemistry that helps to accent the tentpoles of a show that veers from fanciful entertainment to gutting gravitas.

“Circle” starts with a cheer as McArthur and Adams saunter onstage with wine glasses. They deliver a bit of bubbly whimsy in “A Women’s Perspective, Revisited.” Near the end of “Circle,” the duo brings out a complement of Twin Cities performers, and also enlists audience members on “Lockdown,” a piece about school shootings that ends with the outlining of bodies in chalk.

“Circle” also nods to Pina Bausch’s “The Nelken Line,” and to the suffragettes’ movement. The latter history, plus excerpts of Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” and Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s writings, are used to address the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.

In lesser hands, this could be a bunch of clunky failures. But Adams and McArthur make it all smartly engaging. (Wed., Sat. & Sun., Barbara Barker Center for Dance)

 

 

https://www.startribune.com/review-streisand-angelou-and-wheaties-evoked-in-the-eclectic-minnesota-fringe-festival/600810807

 

A Women’s Perspective, revisited (2013)

Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost…” (2023) Screen Dance

For Pina, the legendary Tanztheatre choreographer

Choreographed by Pina Bausch from “The Nelken Line”

Directed by Cynthia Adams

Performed by ISU Modern Dance I Class Spring 2023, Cynthia Adams, Bailey Douglas, Elizabeth Ferreira, Kathleen Hurley, Anna Hurley Nong, Brian James, Lana Lyddon Hatten, Lisa Lewis, Jose Manuel Gonzales, Paula McArthur, Dani Seffes and Oscar the dog

Music by Louis Armstrong

Editing: Dominick Ervelli and Xiaoquan Zhao

Footage was shot in 2020 based on the international outreach project of the Pina Bausch Foundation, The Nelken Line.

Diversions, Distraction and Digressions (2024)

Music: Original Sound Score by Amy X. Neuburg

Text: Cynthia Adams

Project Earth (video excerpt 1991)

Text: Excerpts from The Third Planet: Operating Instructions by the late environmentalist activist David R. Brower first published in The New York Times magazine on March 16, 1975

Music: Abonecronedrone 3 by Sheila Chandra

Video: Mike Griffith

Original choreography for this piece premiered in Oakland, California in 1991

Lockdown (2022)

Local performers joining will be announced.

Music sound collage by Cynthia Adams using excerpts from The Wall by Pink Floyd; Romeo and Juliet by Prokoviev; Intermezzo I by Davide Swarup; Addressing the Senate by Senator Christopher Murphy; Don’t Worry by Bobby McFerrin 

 

Warning: Some parents may find this piece disturbing

“There were 51 school shootings in 2022 that resulted in injuries or deaths, the most in a single year since Education Week began tracking such incidents in 2018.” (Education Week)

Video: 109th bead

Conception and Direction: Cynthia Adams

Screen Dance: Douglas Rosenberg

Music: Ca de`roule Raphael Beau

 

This video was part of a larger solo piece 109th Bead.  Created in 2006

The Great Regression (2023)

Music: Music and text sound collage by Cynthia Adams; Free Flow by Joro, Mary Poppins Sister Suffregette by the Sherman Brothers, Rosie the Riveter Song by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loed, Clocks by Man in a Shed

Text: Excerpts from Abigail Adams, Maya Angelou, Susan B. Anthon, Ruth Bader Ginsberg

The Great Regression was created in reaction to the US Supreme Court ruling in June 2022 overturning Roe V Wade.

Letting Go (2021) will be performed in some locations outside with weather permitting.

 

 

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