CORE Opens 30th Anniversary Season in Atlanta With Premier At the High Museum's Habsburg Exhibition, Oct. 23

CORE, the award-winning contemporary dance organization based in Atlanta and Houston (www.coredance.org), will open its 30th Anniversary Season in Atlanta with a world premier of “waltz” created specifically to be performed at the High Museum of Art during the exhibition of “Habsburg Splendor: Masterpieces From Vienna’s Imperial Collections”. The performances will be held at 7:30 p.m. and repeated at 8:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 23, in the museum’s Robinson Atrium, Stent Wing, and are included with $10 museum admission (www.high.org). Joshua Rackliffe, a dance artist with CORE Performance Company (CPC), is the featured artist and choreographer for “waltz”. This marks the first occasion for a current member of CPC to create a new work for the professional ensemble, according to CORE Founder and Artistic Director Sue Schroeder.

“I’m honored to facilitate the creation of a piece for my fellow CPC Dance Artists,” said Rackliffe. “This is an extremely talented group of contemporary dancers, and we have the advantage of knowing each other’s dance styles and strengths. While this is my first piece created for CORE, I’ve had a number of my works performed in Chicago, where I trained at the Dance Center of Columbia College, and in Atlanta. For “waltz”, I am focusing mainly on movement invention, utilizing the abilities and facility of each individual body to create a vocabulary that is exciting and, most importantly, accessible to any type of viewer.”

The Habsburg exhibition will feature nearly 100 artworks and artifacts from Vienna’s Kunsthistoriches Museum including paintings, sculpture, Greek and Roman antiquities, clothing, armor, carriages and decorative art objects. Rackliffe’s new dance work reflects the opulence of the collection, and continues CORE’s decades-long history of creating richly-layered, site-specific dance works at museums and other cultural destinations.

“I am invigorated by the creative energy that comes from creating and performing in museums,” says Schroeder. “Rather than taking the approach of having the artwork inspire the movement, I research and study the intent of the artists within an exhibition, while simultaneously integrating numerous artistic mediums into my dance-making process, many of them inclusive of visual art elements such as painting, drawing, journaling, pen & ink and even sculpture. Because the entry point for most all of my work begins with improvisation, these alternate creative processes encourage the dance artists to access unique and ultimately new movements, which results in a new dance for a new concept.”

Throughout this 30th Anniversary Season in Atlanta, CORE will offer performances, classes, workshops, summer camps, teacher training and Dynamic X-Change, a program that provides safe, creative outlets for people in need of building self-awareness, communication skills, healthy body awareness and movement appreciation. CORE’s 30th season in Atlanta is supported in part by the Pattillo Foundation, the O Fund for New Work, Cameron and Roberts Insurance Agency, Cornerstone Bank, Primary Care Chiropractic, Studio Lotus, Decatur Atlanta Printing and Still Hot Yoga. The performances of “waltz” are made possible in part by the High Museum of Art.

ABOUT CORE

Celebrating its 30th season in Atlanta beginning fall 2015, CORE, an award-winning contemporary dance organization, creates, performs and presents compelling and distinctive original dance works that ignite the creative spirit and foster cultural conversations. For over three decades, CORE has initiated and supported innovation, collaboration, artistic risk-taking and sustainable art-making in dance. CORE was founded in 1980 in Houston, Texas by dancer and choreographer Sue Schroeder. Five years later, the organization added Atlanta, Ga. as a second home base, and now cultivates dance awareness and education in both cities, as well as throughout the country and around the world. CORE is organized around three initiatives: CORE Performs, CORE Presents and CORE Connects. CORE Performance Company, the professional contemporary dance company of CORE, is internationally recognized for the physical and emotional range of its Dance Artists, as well as its innovative and compelling work. CORE’s Decatur, Ga. studios host classes and events for teachers and dance students of all experience levels. www.coredance.org