Bowdoin’s annual December Dance Concert was held in the new Edwards Art Center last week, and featured dances by Bowdoin dance faculty Nyama McCarthy Brown, Gwyneth Jones and Paul Sarvis. The video above presents brief segments of the full performance.

The Modern I Repertory and Performance class presented a new work playing with ideas of formality versus informality. Accompanied by twelve chairs and music from the Bremer Kaffeehaus Orchester and the Comedian Harmonists, the dancers experimented with movement and behavior, filling a space twice the size of Pickard stage.

“Kaleidoscope,” performed by a trio of ballet students, investigated ballet outside of the traditional context. In the dance, the dancers  deconstructed, turned upside down and physically manipulated ballet positions. They explored fragmentations of ballet vocabulary throughout.

Responding to the scale and depth of the new dance studio in the Edwards Arts Center, a quintet of dancers from the advanced repertory course performed “Winterreise (Winter Journey).” Playing off the mathematical completeness of Bach’s two and three part inventions, the dancers inhabited a vaguely Germanic landscape with additional musical help from Schubert and an unlikely cover of the Beatles’ “Yesterday.”

Watch the full performance here.