St. Joseph’s Autorino Center announces upcoming season
The Autorino Center at the University of St. Joseph is rolling with some major changes at the university in general. That’s reflected in the center’s just-announced 2019-20 season of dance, music and performance-art events.
The series features avant-garde dancers, actors, musicians and spoken word artists, tackling themes of social justice, poverty, racial profiling and how we experience and preserve popular art. The shows’ current-events immediacy will be amplified by surrounding them with talks, classes and online media.
The overall theme of the season? Disruption. Well-organized, upbeat, versatile, multi-disciplinary disruption, but disruption nonetheless.
“This is a time of great change and growth across the entire campus at the University, a disruption in a positive sense,” says Steven Ginsburg, director of the center. “We’re celebrating the second class of male undergraduates. The Autorino Center is keeping up with this new energy while building campus and community cohesion as part of all of our public events.
“I take being housed at a university seriously,” Ginsburg continues. “Why is there an arts center here? What are our needs at the moment? There are disruptions in our society. Some create ease, others create difficulties. We need to be a diagnostician of our community.”
• As always, modern dance is a major part of Autorino programming. The season-opening event, Sept. 27, “Black,” has the Boston-based hip-hop duo The Wondertwins dancing amid an “audio/video collage of policing, violence, and racial bias in communities of color.”
• “Pang!,” a provocative performance piece by California-based performance artists Dan Froot & Company on Oct. 25 takes the form of a live radio play, staging oral histories of families living in poverty in three far-flung American cities.
• The center holds its 17th annual 5x5 Contemporary Dance Festival, showcasing new work by local dance troupes, on Nov. 2.
• Hip-hop dancer/choreographer Raphael Xavier, who performed at the center in 2017, brings his latest work “Sassafrazz” there on March 20, 2020. The show has four break dancers collaborating with four jazz musicians.
Xavier is a great example of how Autorino appearances go well beyond a single performance.
“When Raphael Xavier is here,” Ginsburg says, “he’s doing a dance master class on Monday, a public lecture on Tuesday, and holding a public rehearsal of “Sassafrazz” on Wednesday, all before the performance on Friday.”
• Ed Fast and Congapop Oct. 4 (the 11th Annual Noche Latina evening)
• Guitarist Daniel Salazar Jr. with a valentine-themed “Romance de la Guitarra” concert Feb. 14
• Uganda story/song-spinner Samite with “The Story of Mutoto” at 1 p.m. Feb. 22 followed by a full concert with his band at 7:30 p.m.
• And Hartford-based multi-styled musician Lee “Mixashawn” Rozie, whose “An American Songbook” show March 7 traces Native American contributions to American music through the centuries.
• “Shaking the Core” on Dec. 5 is a combination of spoken word, dance and rap that asks so many spiritual questions that it demands to be performed in the university’s Connor Chapel of Our Lady rather than in the Autorino Center. The event is a collaboration among the center, hip-hop artist Self Suffice (aka Khaiim the RapOet), Sageseekers Productions the University of St. Joseph Campus Ministry.
• The Autorino Center season ends April 8 with a screening of the 2016 film “Samiblood,” a story of racism, assimilation and eugenics at a Swedish boarding school in the 1930s.
The center is also continuing its “pay it forward” program, where patrons are encouraged to pay for tickets for designated shows that don’t have required admission fees. Those payments, and other donations, go into a fund that helps defray ticket costs at other events and creates more “pay it forward” opportunities. Ginsburg says the program has been a heartening success.
“I’ve received checks in the mail from people who can’t attend the shows, and seen people pay up to $100 for a ticket. It inspires generosity.”
Ginsburg says USJ students and faculty usually comprise about 20 percent of audiences at the Autorino, the rest coming from outside the university community.
Pay-It-Forward performances for the 2019-2020 season include The Wondertwins in BLACK, Pang!, Shake the Core, and Sámi Blood. Tickets for PIF performances can be secured in advance via autorino.usj.edu.