This modern dance troupe, founded 38 years ago by Joan Myers Brown to cultivate black dancers and choreographers, will perform a program of highly athletic material rooted in Jazz, modern, hip-hop and African traditions.

The program consists of four works, two of which received their world premieres in Philadelphia last year.  One of the works, Zane A. Booker’s "In Between Time," set to the music of Chuck Mangione, offers a view of Utopia where dancers reach for the stars, emoting thoughts, hopes and dreams on stage.  The other piece, Rennie Harris’s "Philadelphia Experiment," is hip-hop at its finest, a retrospective of the city of Philadelphia. An acknowledgement of political, social, and economic change, this dynamic, energetic piece alludes to the rhythms, posture, physicality and speed of the city of Philadelphia. 

The other two works complement the diversity of Philadanco’s repertory.  Daniel Ezralow’s “Pulse” is described by dancer and assistant to Ezralow, Lara Tinari, as “magnetic energy captured on stage. It is comprised of a sliding technique which gives the illusion of bodies being governed through movement and space by a molecular charge.”  “La Valse,” choreographed by the late Gene Hill Sagan, who was the company’s resident choreographer from 1976-1991 and whose works have appeared with The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and Pennsylvania Ballet, incorporates 8-10 dancers in a waltz that rises from a simple beginning, to a feverish whirl of virtuoso lifts, turns and bodies flung through space at a dizzying pace.