Cal Performances
Zellerbach Hall, 101 Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720
Friday, December 4 @ 7:30 PM
Special UC Berkeley Grad Student Price: $10 (you may bring one guest @ guest price)
Aszure Barton, choreographer and director
Ambrose Akinmusire, composer, electronics, and trumpet
West Coast Premiere
Two leading lights in their fields—choreographer Aszure Barton and composer Ambrose Akinmusire—create an urgent, intimate yet wildly provocative world in which dancers and musician come together onstage in a thrilling embrace of human friction, tension, and explosive beauty. Barton is known for mining complex emotional terrain in her works, as in her smash hit Mere Mortals at San Francisco Ballet in 2024. She “offers an entire world, full of surprise and humor, emotion and pain, expressed through a dance vocabulary that takes ballet technique and dismantles it to near-invisibility” (The New York Times). Oakland’s own Akinmusire, “a trumpeter of deep expressive resources and a composer of kaleidoscopic vision” (NPR Music), performs his instrumental and electronics score live.
“It’s magical. You can’t take your eyes off it. And you can’t get enough of this declaration of love for being together, which continually invents new patterns to explain itself… [In B E N D] the soul finds enough air to listen carefully”—tanznetz