Betzi Roe Reimagines Walking in Sand at the Vine

 

As part of the 2024 Summer Series at the Vine, Betzi Roe will be re-presenting her contemplative work Walking in Sand created in 2022 specifically for the intimate Vine Theater space.  What started out as a post-Covid isolation experiment to bring audiences and performers back into the theater, turned out to be a lovely, evocative, work that reaffirmed our collective sense of safety, and peace.

​

"Walking in Sand" includes a solo in a dress of one hundred yards of fabric, filling the entire theater, that imagines the body as landscape and landscape as the body. A group piece follows in candlelight with seven multi-age dancers who respond to meditation images by artist Wren Polansky. The dancers, engaged in contemplative movement, attend to the kinesthetic qualities of the images and bring a new appreciation to the idea that time, moving slowly, is not empty.

 

Mojalet Dance Collective will perform Tainted by Artistic Director Faith Jensen-Ismay as the opening piece. Roe feels that Tainted and Walking in Sand make a unique concert by using the performance space in non-traditional ways. Ismay's works deals with the emotional experience of a person tainted by something undesirable.  Both works suggest that overcoming, evolving or transcending negative aspects of the human condition is always possible.

​

Betzi Roe is a pioneer of contemporary dance in San Diego and co-founded the 3's Co. & Dancers in '74 with Patrick Nollet and Jean Isaacs. She was an adjunct faculty member at several San Diego colleges and retired after 22 years as Chair of the Dance Conservatory at Coronado School of the Arts. She has toured extensively as a soloist and produced many works as an independent choreographer. Roe celebrates her unique position of being a 76-year-old mover who is still performing and wants to be a figure of encouragement for dancers at any age.

​

​