Case Western Reserve University’s Department of Dance announces the 2025 production of Landmarks, an evening of exciting new and revisited works. The program features Mark Morris’s Words, Karen Potter’s The Burghers of Calais, Gary Galbraith’s Chambers of Painted Light, and Game of …, a new duet by Yidi Lin and Richard Oaxaca. Morris and Potter’s works feature music performed by pianist Karin Tooley and cellist Joe Teeter both graduates of the Cleveland Institute of Music.
Landmarks will be performed on October 31 and November 1, 6–8 at 7:30 pm, and November 2 at 2:30 pm at Mather Dance Center, 11040 Bellflower Road, on the Case Western Reserve campus in University Circle.
Words
Mark Morris’s Words (2014), staged by Karlie Budge of the Mark Morris Dance Group and a CWRU alumna, is set to selections from Felix Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. The work is a study of musicality, pattern, and connection, showcasing Morris’s distinctive blend of clarity and wit. Dancers move through shifting formations and partnering that highlight the score’s structure, while a curtain carried across the stage creates playful and surprising entrances and exits.
The Burghers of Calais
The Burghers of Calais was inspired by the Auguste Rodin sculpture of the same name and though in Rodin's sculpture, there are six figures, the dance was originally created as a solo in 1998 and then enlarged to a trio in 1999. Choreographer Karen Potter visited the Rodin museum in Paris to study each singular sculpture that lines a walkway at the museum and conducted research about the siege of the City of Calais, France that itself initially inspired Rodin to create the sculpture. The costumes were designed by Potter and constructed by Jeffrey Wirsing and Potter.
Chambers of Painted Light
Gary Galbraith’s four-sectioned work "Chambers of Painted Light" is an extension of "In Another Place and Time" which he created in 2023. Galbraith, who the Cleveland Plain Dealer has called “..an innovator in dance and technology”, created this abstract work, a visually stunning landscape of beautiful light created by immersive projection design enhanced by multi-channel audio. This abstract dance leads the viewer through a multitude of visually radiant scenes all reflecting the intimacy of body/movement with environment. AI-supported LiDAR and motion tracking technologies are used to follow dancers in real-time so that their movements and locations are used to control this immersive dance environment. Galbraith has used this state-of-the-art approach in other recent works and is a leader in this multi-technology infusion with dance.
Game of …
Game of …, a new work co-choreographed and performed by faculty members Yidi Lin and Richard Oaxaca is a dynamic interplay of partnership and rivalry. Every step is a negotiation with moments of power struggle. Partnering turns into tactical maneuvering, and every touch is both an obstacle and an opportunity. The choreography weaves together moments of intense confrontation with fleeting alliances, as each dancer adapts, anticipates, and counters the other's strategy.
Ticket Information
Tickets are $15 for CWRU students with ID, $20 for seniors age 60+, CWRU personnel and non-CWRU students, and $25 for general admission. Online ticket sales open on September 29 via https://case.edu/artsci/dance/news-and-events/ticket-reservations.