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Full Radius Dance and its executive and artistic director Douglas Scott will host the 31st annual Modern Atlanta Dance Festival (MAD Fest) on June 15 and 16 at the Emory Performing Arts Studio. This year, MAD Fest coincides with the Dance/USA 2023 Conference, giving a national audience the opportunity to experience a juried sampling from some of Atlanta’s best and brightest contemporary dance makers.
In a recent interview with ArtsATL, Scott, who is one of three local dancemakers being honored with a Champion Award by Dance/USA, discussed why he loves the festival format and has dedicated so much time and energy to keeping MAD Fest going.
“It started out in the early years because people would tell me they don’t like modern dance or they don’t like dance,” he said. When Scott would ask why: “They would say ‘I saw this one company.’ So I would say, ‘You watch one show on TV, and now you don’t like TV anymore?’”
Scott says MAD Fest gives the audience a chance to see “seven different visions” of what modern dance is in a single evening. He encourages those new to the art form to “hang around. If you don’t like that first piece, maybe the next one will be a work that really speaks to you.”
This year’s program comprises a range of styles and explores themes as varied as family, love and loss, the sacred and profane, cultural and racial identity, and quantum physics. One would be hard pressed not to find something to love.
Although it started out as an open festival, for most of its history MAD Fest has featured a slate of seven pieces selected from a large pool of applicants by a panel of nationally prominent artists from dance and other disciplines. Some members of the local organizing committee for the Dance/USA Conference helped adjudicate MAD Fest 2023, which will feature work by Atlanta Chinese Dance Company, Audrey Crabtree, Julio Medina and Scott Wheet, Kit Modus, Lashonda Johnson, Novoa Dances and Full Radius Dance.
Full Radius Dance will perform an excerpt of Scott’s work-in-progress, Saint. Scott said the work was inspired by “the question of how one becomes closer to God, and the idea, which frankly, I find absurd, that you only get closer to God and sainthood by suffering. I mean why can’t you be a saint because you supported local dance, or you just led a really good life where you loved everybody around you?” Saint examines how a single life can embody both the sacred and profane, and who gets to decide which is which.
Atlanta Chinese Dance Company will present Ribbon Dance of Empowerment, the finale of a longer work in which choreographer and artistic director Kerry Lee tells the story of her experience as a Chinese American growing up within the Black/White binary of the American South. The piece will offer audiences a taste of the company’s signature fusion of contemporary dance with traditional Chinese forms.
Kit Modus, fresh off its own end-of-season concert on June 14, will share an excerpt from artistic director Jillian Mitchell’s Scion, which explores the familial and physical interactions that shape the universe.
Duets from Novoa Dances, and Scott Wheet and Julio Medina both depart from convention. Choreographer Meaghan Novoa’s piece Momentary Impulse grew out of her love for neoclassical pas de deux and a desire to see queer embodiments of divine inspiration narratives. Wheet and Medina collaborated to create a dance about the physicality and synergy that arises when cis-male bodies share performance space together. The working title of their piece is innermost.
Lashonda Johnson, one of the Dance Canvas 2023 artist cohort, created I Pledge My Heart to depict the risks and rewards of “giving your all” to relationships, career and even pastimes. Audrey Crabtree’s Wail will feature the music of Sammy Davis Jr. and an up tempo, jazz-inspired vocabulary reflecting the iconic singer’s signature vocal style.
As the Atlanta dance community closes its 2022-23 dance season and hits pause for the summer, MAD Fest will let audiences catch up on some of what they missed and get a glimpse of what is in store for 2023-24. Tickets for the performance on Thursday, June 15, are currently reserved for Dance/USA Conference attendees, but may be made available to the general public closer to the show date. Tickets for all shows are pay-what-you-can with a suggested price of $20.00.
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Robin Wharton studied dance at the School of American Ballet and the Pacific Northwest Ballet School. As an undergraduate at Tulane University in New Orleans, she was a member of the Newcomb Dance Company. In addition to a Bachelor of Arts in English from Tulane, Robin holds a law degree and a Ph.D. in English, both from the University of Georgia.
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