Albany, NY -- The performing arts centers at The Egg and the University at Albany, which jointly present Dance in Albany, are proud to present the Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company on Saturday, May 18, 2024 at 8pm as the final performance in the 2023-24 series. The Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company (ESDC) is the resident company of The Egg and will be joined on stage by musicians Brian Melick, Maria Zemantauski and Bob Buckley (see bios at end). The performance will take place at The Egg at the Empire State Plaza in downtown Albany.

Two works on the program will feature live performance of original compositions fused with an array of jazz and funk by Melick and Zemantauski. The percussionist and guitarist will play live for Falling from 2003 which was commissioned by The Egg for its 25^th anniversary. Buckley, on fretless electric guitar, will join the pair in performing the music for Compas which premiered at The Egg in 2008.

The three musicians will also offer a musical interlude between the choreographic works.

The other two dances on the program premiered earlier this season and have visual arts at their core.

The company’s newest work, Boundary Behavior, is set to the music of David Walther, Jr. and premiered at the UAlbany Performing Arts Center in January as part of the Dance in Albany series. For this presentation of the work, there will be the addition of a projected image of kite paintings by Willie Marlowe (see bio at end) that are made from different shapes of painted triangles - equilateral, scalene and isosceles - on paper and form a collage.

The fourth and final work on the program is Séance which premiered at the Opalka Gallery in December.  It was created in the gallery and inspired by the exhibition “Séance: Photographs by Shannon Taggart.” The piece is set to “And the Snow Did Lie,” a composition by the late Hilary Tann (see bio at end).  A collaborating artist and friend of the company, Tann’s works have also accompanied previous dances including Becoming (2006) and A Staying Place (1993).  The company is honored to remember their esteemed colleague with the performance of this recent work.

For well over 30 years, ESDC has presented the provocative and richly imagined choreography of Artistic Director Ellen Sinopoli. Its commitment to “create, collaborate, educate and partner” remains in the forefront as it shares its work with diverse audiences through concerts, showcases, residencies, workshops and educational outreach.  The company seeks to enrich the community by enhancing the appreciation, understanding and experience of contemporary performing arts. ESDC employs a steady roster of professional modern dancers, applauded for their consistent excellence and artistry, to bring dance to traditional and non-traditional venues. Sinopoli has choreographed over one hundred new works and her many artistic collaborations and projects serve as a conduit to bring together talented artists (both regional and national) from varied genres that include visual artists, sculptors, architects, composers and musicians, poets and storytellers, videographers, photographers and physicists.

Prior to the performance, there will be a Prelude talk sponsored by the Dance Alliance that begins at 7:15pm and will feature Sinopoli along with several of her collaborators. 

Tickets are $26 and are available at The Egg Box Office on the Concourse Level of the Empire State Plaza in Albany, by phone at 518-473-1845 and online at www.theegg.org. A $13 student rush price is available at the box office window that evening to those with a valid ID.

All performances in the Dance in Albany series that take place at The Egg are supported by Executive Park at 4 Tower Place in Albany. The Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company's programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

BOB BUCKLEY: In a performing career that has spanned over thirty years, Bob Buckley has lent his ability as a multi-instrumentalist to a number of Upstate New York ensembles covering many genres of music. The 2000’s were an especially busy time, starting as a bassist for the indie power-pop outfit the Orange, and later as a guitarist and dobroist in the critically acclaimed Americana band The Kamikaze Hearts. Both groups toured the eastern portion of the United States and received significant radio airplay throughout the country and beyond.  

More recently and closer to home in the Capital Region of New York, he has played a supporting role in a number of live acts and has been a much sought-after session player for some of the most creative performers the area has offered up. This list includes Motherjudge, Bryan Thomas, Tom McWatters, Mike McMann and the UnderDawgs, and Maria Zemantauski. In 2023, Bob became the full-time bassist and harmony vocalist for the Edison Music Award winning country/bluegrass band Jim Gaudet & The Railroad Boys who, in addition to performing regularly in the Albany area, have amassed a devoted fan base throughout the United States through their performances at folk and bluegrass festivals.

WILLIE MARLOWE has shown paintings in solo and invitational exhibitions in the US and abroad. Her work is included in museum, university, corporate and private collections, and has been supported by grants from Artist’s Space, NYC, and by numerous Strategic Opportunity Stipend awards from the NY Foundation on the Arts. She has been a visiting artist in Barbados, West Indies, in Cortona, Italy, and in Wexford, Ireland, where she had a ten-year retrospective exhibition at the Wexford Arts Center. She had also curated shows at Albany Center Gallery, the Dietel Gallery, Emma Willard School, Troy, and co-curated shows at the Russell Sage College Gallery and The Art Center of the Capital Region in Troy.

She has had artist's residencies at Millay Arts in Austerlitz, NY, the Cill Rialaig Project in Ballinskelligs, Ireland, Emily Harvey Foundation for the Arts, Venice, Italy, Milkwood International Residencies, Cesky Krumlov, South Bohemia, Czech Republic and Atelier Cres, Croatia, and Obras Holland, Renkum, the Netherlands. She was a member of the Albany-Tula Alliance delegation to Russia; Tula was Albany's sister city in Russia. She was invited by the Tula State Lev Tolstoy Pedagogical University as a visiting artist and gave a presentation on her paintings done during residencies in Ireland and Italy. She often works on intimately scaled acrylic paintings on paper. Her luminous surfaces are achieved by using an intense palette and successive layers of translucent glazes. The “Kite” constructions are part of a larger body of work, “Triangles/Tondos/Triptychs.” The kites are made from different shapes of painted triangles, equilateral, scalene and isosceles on paper and form a collage. They have been shown at the National Association of Women Artists Gallery in NYC, at The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, Martinez Gallery in Troy and Albany Center Gallery. (www.williemarlowe.com)

BRIAN MELICK, musician, educator, author and designer, has been professionally involved in music since the early age of thirteen. He is a featured recording artist on over 400 commercially released recordings on independent as well as major labels highlighted by his seven solo projects, “Percussive Voices” Hudson Valley Records (debut at 23 on the World Music Chart), “Diverse Elements”, “uduboy”, “In Motion”, “Diverse World”, “Perpetual Motion”, and ”The Art of Udu” Gene Michael Productions. The last three were released as sound libraries with Universal Pictures, MGM Studios, Columbia Pictures, Fox Network, Discover Channel, TLC, and with Disney.

Brian performs throughout the US and Canada with Cathie Ryan, Kevin McKrell, Elizabeth Woodbury-Kasius & Heard, Maria Zemantauski, Joy Adler, Bearnstein Bard Quartet / Quintet, Gus Mancini & Sonic Soul, Seth & The Moodymelix, Golfstrom, Warden & Co., Side Show Gypsy, Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company, SPAC Dance and his ongoing concert series “Acoustic Doorways.” (www.uduboy.com)

MARIA ZEMANTAUSKI is a nylon-string guitarist and composer whose style is influenced by a variety of musical genres, most notably, Spanish classical, flamenco and American fingerstyle. She has performed in Spain, Italy and across the continental United States to great acclaim. Her albums, Mrs. Laughinghouse (1997), Seeing Red (2000), Under the Lemon Tree (2005), Petty Feet & Mistletoe (2010) and the self-titled, Maria Zemantauski (2018) have received stellar reviews from music critics around the world.

Maria’s programs are a dynamic blend of artistic freedom, innovation and tradition. This is not surprising considering that as a child, she resisted guitar lessons, telling her encouraging parents that she wanted to “discover the instrument on her own without being told what to do.” As one reviewer wrote, “Zemantauski has continually pushed the boundaries of the possible with her trusty 6-string, blending genres that have little or no business appearing on the same bill, much less in the same song. It's rarely less than electrifying to watch her do it." She believes that the expressive possibilities of the guitar are limitless and pursues her music with passion, confidence and grace.

With a Masters in Cultural Anthropology, she is a relentless promoter of the arts as a vital educational component and an integral part of society. She is highly regarded for combining both performance and sociocultural analysis and is a frequent guest lecturer at colleges and universities nationwide, including the University of San Francisco, University of California at Santa Cruz, Eastman School of Music, Ithaca College School of Music, St. Lawrence University, California State University at San Marcos and The University of Kentucky at Lexington. Her music can also be heard in the award-winning documentary, “Radical Harmonies,” an historical perspective of Women’s Music Festivals and “The Heretics” a documentary film about the Women’s Art Movement of the 1970’s in the USA.

Maria performs extensively as a soloist, with percussionist Brian Melick (aka Uduboy), guitarist/mandolinist, Sten Isachsen, and with the unique and flexible Maria Z Ensemble. She has been the Coordinator of Cultural Affairs at Hudson Valley Community College in Troy, N.Y. since 2004 and is on the faculty in the college's Department of Fine Arts, Theater Arts & Digital Media. (www.mariazguitar.com)

From her childhood in the coal-mining valleys of South Wales, Hilary Tann developed the love of nature which has inspired all her music, whether written for performance in the United States (Adirondack Light for narrator and orchestra, for the Centennial of Adirondack State Park, 1992) or for her first home in Wales (the celebratory overture, With the heather and small birds, commissioned by the 1994 Cardiff Festival). A deep interest in the traditional music of Japan led to study of the ancient Japanese vertical bamboo flute (the shakuhachi) from 1985 to 1991. Among many works reflecting this special interest is the large orchestral work, From afar, premiered in 1996 by the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kirk Trevor. From afar received its European premiere in 2000 by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and was selected for the opening concert of The International Festival of Women in Music Today at the Seoul Arts Center in Korea (KBS Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Apo Hsu, 2003). Hilary Tann (hilarytann.com) lives south of the Adirondacks in upstate New York where she is the John Howard Payne Professor of Music at Union College in Schenectady. She holds degrees in composition from the University of Wales at Cardiff and from Princeton University. From 1982 to 1995, she was active in the International League of Women Composers and served in a number of Executive Committee positions. Numerous organizations have supported her work, including the Welsh Arts Council, New York State Council on the Arts, Hanson Institute for American Music, Vaughan Williams Trust, Holst Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer/Arts Endowment Commissioning Music USA. Her connection with Wales continues in various choral commissions, including Psalm 104 (Praise, my soul) for the North American Welsh Choir (1998) and Paradise for Tenebrae (Gregynog Festival, 2008). The influence of the Welsh landscape is also evident in many chamber works and in text selections from Welsh poets George Herbert (Exultet Terra for double choir and double reed quintet), R. S. Thomas (Seven Poems of Stillness for cello and narrator) and Menna Elfyn (Songs of the Cotton Grass for soprano and oboe). In July 2001, The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Owain Arwel Hughes premiered The Grey Tide and the Green, commissioned for the Last Night of the Welsh Proms. A series of concerto commissions threads though her orchestral work – for violin (Here, the Cliffs premiered by the North Carolina Symphony with Corine Brouwer Cook, 1997), alto saxophone (In the First, Spinning Place premiered by the University of Arizona Symphony with Debra Richtmeyer, March 2000), and cello (Anecdote, premiered by the Newark (DE) Symphony with Romanian cellist Ovidiu Marinescu, December 2000). Shakkei, a diptych for oboe and small orchestra, premiered by Virginia Shaw in the Presteigne Festival, August 2007, has since been performed multiple times, including in Dublin Ireland, at the 2008 IAWM Congress in Beijing, in New York City, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, and at the 15th World Saxophone Congress in Bangkok (2009), with Susan Fancher (solo soprano saxophone) and the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra. Recent composer-residencies include the 2011 Eastman Women in Music Festival, 2013 Women Composers Festival of Hartford, and 2015 Ty Cerdd, Music Center Wales. Over sixty works are available on CD including three solo discs of vocal, chamber and orchestral music. A Musical Opinion Quarterly (Oct. 2014) review of the 2014 Presteigne Festival string quartet commission, And the Snow Did Lie, concludes: “… its lyrical melodies, delicate textures and subtly variegated hues made an exquisite and lasting impression.”