Move to This

fter sitting at home for nearly 18 months, people are ready to get moving. That’s particularly true of Kinetic Lab, an innovative choreography group in UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Theater and Dance that allows students to develop their artistic voices.

The young artists will kick off the 2021-22 dance performance season with Kinetic Lab 2021, Thursday and Friday, Dec. 2 and 3, at 7:30 p.m. at the campus’s Hatlen Theater. Presale tickets are $15 for general audience and $11 for UCSB faculty, staff, alumni, students, seniors and children. Day of tickets are $15 and $19. Purchase tickets here.

Directed by Brandon Whited, an assistant professor of theater and dance, the program will feature works by BFA dance students Ana Ko Glass, Alice Lousen, Robbie Rosenmiller, Michaela Perez-Kelly and Britney Walton. In addition, the UCSB Dance Company, led by director Delila Mosely, will perform “Group Autogenics,” a new work co-choreographed by Derion Loman and Madison Olandt.

“We are very excited for UCSB Dance’s return to the stage with live, in-person performances,” Whited said. “The transition back to fully in-person dance classes has been both a triumph and a challenge for our students. The mental, physical, emotional and artistic labor required has been immense, and I am so proud of our BFA student choreographers for digging deep and creating what will be a wonderful concert reflecting on many of these dynamics in their own lives during the last year and a half.”

In addition, he said, “Theater and Dance is requiring masking and vaccination to attend live performances, and we have moved Kinetic Lab to our larger Hatlen Theater in order to provide safe and comfortable space for performance attendees.”