David Roussève/REALITY
Presented by Jacob's Pillow
Dance, music, text, and video come together in David Roussève/REALITY’s new work Halfway to Dawn, a “heartfelt and heart-breaking homage” (Times Quotidian) to Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington’s prolific but long-obscured collaborator, known for singles like “Take the ‘A’ Train”, “Satin Doll”, and “Lush Life”. Interpreting Strayhorn’s signature music sensibility through a dynamic movement vocabulary which melds jazz, modern, postmodern, and social dance, Halfway to Dawn creates an abstract portrait of Strayhorn’s life as a gay, African American jazz composer in the 1950s-60s.