This preview has been provided by the American Dance Festival.

The duo, first paired by ADF in 2015, Claire Porter & Sara Juli present their latest ADF-commissioned collaboration, The Lectern. Living according to rules is the demand on all of us. We are surrounded by the rules of our laws, protocols, manners, and expectations. But what are these rules? What are the rules of the game we’re playing? And what happens when rules take over? Using movement, text, sound, song, and a catwalk runway, the acclaimed comedic performers upend our day-to-day, necessary to-survive, rule-rituals in The Lectern and find the hilarious in the rule-bending of our daily lives.

Claire Porter (www.cportables.com) is a writer, dancer, and choreographer who has performed in Scotland, Germany, Poland, Holland, Latvia, Korea, and India and in the US at The Joyce Theater, Town Hall, American Dance Festival, Lucille Ball Comedy Festival, Bates Dance Festival, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Florida Dance Festival, and The Kennedy Center with the American College Dance Association. Porter is a Guggenheim Fellow 2013 and has received NEA Choreography Fellowships, NJ State Council on the Arts Choreography Fellowships, NewMusicUSA Awards, a Rockefeller Foundation Residency at Bellagio Center Italy, and Mid-Atlantic Choreography Fellowships. She choreographs for her Claire Porter / PORTABLES, other dance companies, faculty members, and University Dance Companies. Claire performs her award winning Namely, Muscles, the poetic enactment of all the muscles of the body and then some, at body conferences, poetry festivals, medical schools and theater festivals, most recently for the UnitedSoloFestival in NYC 2016. Claire teaches Laban Movement Analysis for NYU Steinhardt and Creative Process for the new MFA program at Montclair State University.

Sara Juli has been creating and performing innovative solo work since 2000. In NYC, Sara’s work has been presented by Performance Space 122, The Chocolate Factory Theater, Danspace Project, 92nd St. Y, Joe’s Pub as part of the Dancenow/NYC Festival, Joyce Soho, Bushwick Starr, and Dixon Place, among others. Nationally, her work has been performed at American Dance Festival, Bates Dance Festival, Napa Valley Opera House, SPACE Gallery, Connecticut College, UC Riverside, Bates College, Artown Reno, IN’s Center for the Performing Arts, among many others. Her work has toured internationally to sold-out houses in The Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, London, and Russia. Sara is a recipient of a 2015-16 New England Foundation for the Arts NEST Touring Grant, a New England Dance Fund Grant and is a 2017-18 National Dance Project recipient for touring support of her solo show, Tense Vagina: an actual diagnosis. Sara is also a 2017 Maine Fellow for the Performing Arts. You can learn more about Sara at www.sarajuli.com and www.suralaconsulting.com

The Lectern by Claire Porter and Sara Juli is commissioned by ADF with support from the Doris Duke/SHS Foundations Award for New Works and The Mary Duke Biddle Foundation. Additional support provided by Hilton Durham near Duke University.

PERFORMANCES

Reynolds Industries Theater

Tuesday, June 20, 8:00pm

Wednesday, June 21, 8:00pm

TICKETS:  $10 – $27