Choreographed by Gianna Burright, dancers in ‘Ever’ performed with, underneath and atop an undulating hillock. (Photos by Shoccara Marcus)
As it has for the past five years, the Kennesaw State University Department of Dance opened its 2025-26 event programming with Double Exposure, the showcase performance for the annual Eleo Pomare–Glenn Conner Choreographic Residency. This year’s bill from internationally emerging choreographers Gianna Burright and Leandro Glory Damasco Jr. offered a well-framed snapshot of how contemporary dance is evolving as an art form in the current moment.
On the surface, Burright’s Ever and Damasco’s XXIV could not have been more different. Ever was lovely but still felt like a work in progress at some points where transitions within and between sections didn’t quite work yet. It was introspective, meditative and even a little weird — in a good way.
XXIV, the clear crowd favorite, cohered as a fully-realized work of art. It was athletic and daring. Damasco created an accessible narrative experience while using a technically complex and formally innovative movement vocabulary. Beneath their surfaces, however, the two works shared a deep, practical research interest in the convergence of dance with theater, an interest that informs the creative process and its outcomes for many movement-based artists working today.
Double Exposure’s success in capturing the zeitgeist in dance resulted, at least in part, from a careful selection process — one guided by the program’s overarching pedagogical mission and informed by student voices. “For us as a department, we’re really interested in choreographers that have a distinct movement language, one different from what students are getting in their classes with KSU faculty,” said Marsha Barsky, professor and chair of the Dance Department. “We are looking for artists with a physical vocabulary that is contemporary, fresh and, above all else, will help expand our students as dancers.”
Barsky also emphasized the importance of teaching experience. “We are not only asking the residents to come in to be dance makers. We are also wanting them to be dance educators for a month.”
This year, from more than 90 applicants based around the globe, a committee of faculty and students narrowed the list of artists down to four to interview. Barsky said that as the Pomare-Conner program has grown in reputation, the number of applications each year has steadily increased. Applicants who looked promising in previous years but were not ultimately selected are, sometimes at Barsky’s encouragement, applying again, as was the case with both Burright and Damasco.
Double Exposure opened with Burright’s piece Ever. A 2024 fall residency artist at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Burright is known for exploration of strong and contrasting emotions in her work. Ever began with one dancer standing on the stage apron in front of the proscenium, a scrim obscuring the main performance area. As she started walking deeper upstage and away from the audience, the scrim rose on a bucolic, brightly-lit scene. Another dancer sat perched on a grassy hillock situated upstage center. A field of artificial grass covered much of the dance surface between them.
The two performed a duet, sliding and lolling on the hillock, which began to undulate in turn. Eventually, all but one of the rest of the ensemble emerged from beneath the circular piece of grass-green shag carpeting forming the surface of the hill to frolic with the opening duo.
One dancer, however, remained beneath the piece of scenery, wearing it draped over her head, obscuring her entire upper body so that only her legs were visible. The lighting dimmed, and the pace of her movements gradually quickened while that of the other dancers slowed. The soloist spun and stepped with surprising agility given the cumbersome prop, even partnering another dancer in a series of shared weight combinations, and the effect was a transition from human-measured time to a slower, Earth-measured tempo.
From this first movement, Ever unfolded as a series of vignettes, with dancers manipulating the turf props to transform them into various set pieces and surfaces. At one point, the circular mat was the soil covering a grave or the quiet bed of a germinating seed — or perhaps it was both at once. Later, dancers raised other pieces into walls surrounding an Edenic garden, the setting for another duet. Toward the middle of Ever, the entire surface became an enclosed pasture or industrialized agricultural field where the full ensemble performed a section of beautifully choreographed and well-synchronized phrase work.
Damasco was a longtime company member and the first resident choreographer at Los Angeles-based DIAVOLO dance company. In XXIV, which closed the Double Exposure program, Damasco successfully leveraged that foundation to create a dynamic, acrobatic piece in which the KSU students’ technical skill, athleticism and artistic range were on full display.
Like Ever, XXIV opened with one dancer standing downstage before a scrim. In contrast with Ever, however, where the individual seemed to be the fundamental unit from which the collective was assembled, in XXIV, Damasco’s choreography almost immediately absorbed the individual into a cohesive ensemble that emerged fully-formed from behind the scrim.
Even as she began lip-synching to a recorded monologue about the monster into which she is always in danger of transforming, the soloist was moving into and out of contact with the other dancers, her words and movements tied to the same music that set the tempo for everyone else. In Ever, the ensemble was a temporary state bookended by opening and closing sections in which Burright foregrounded the dancers spatially and choreographically as separate bodies.
In XXIV, the ensemble was a constant from which the individual soloists would briefly surface to enact each monologue before being drawn back into the group’s embrace. At the beginning of each new section, a projection above the stage would appear counting down from 24 — the duration of the piece in minutes and the hours left to the narrators reflecting on what they had done and left undone.
Damasco’s props were paper and a giant, vaulting pole of a pencil. One section opened with a dancer wishing aloud for a piece of paper, to have the wish answered by a rain of crumpled sheets from the dark space above the stage. In another section, one dancer led the way, entering mid-stage from the wings and unrolling an enormous printer’s roll of paper before her as she moved across to the other side, laying a path while the others followed behind her. At the dramatic climax of XXIV, one dancer dragged the giant pencil onto the stage, twirling it like a martial-artist’s staff. The entire ensemble then transformed it into a parallel bar and then a pole upon which they performed gravity-defying flips, swings and balances.
Though it contained moments of visual and spoken-word comedy, XXIV was ultimately an emotionally rich and deeply moving work that drew the entire audience into a standing ovation. Somewhat less successful in its execution and retaining a level of abstraction that arguably kept the observer at arm’s length, Ever was, nonetheless, just as ambitious a project. It successfully explored the complex relationship between humanity and our environment, as well as in its adherence to nonverbal constraints.
As a program funded by a generous donation from Glen Conner’s family, Double Exposure made a strong showing of how private philanthropy can support artists who push boundaries and defy easy categorization, thereby elevating the quality and the national and international visibility of Atlanta’s college and university dance programs.
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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.
