The Meadows Dance Ensemble at SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts will showcase works by three award-winning choreographers at its Spring Dance Concert, March 28-April 1 in the Bob Hope Theatre of the Owen Arts Center, 6101 Bishop Blvd. on the SMU campus.  Featured will be Five Preludes, a ballet by visiting artist-in-residence Adam Hougland; Song Awakened by SMU faculty member and noted jazz dance artist Danny Buraczeski; and The New You, a world premiere by Meadows Prize winner Shen Wei.

The concert opens with the premiere of Five Preludes, a neo-classical ballet on pointe set to five Rachmaninoff preludes. The work focuses on purity and simplicity of technique and is rooted in the inherent drama of Rachmaninoff’s music. Choreographer Adam Hougland, a Dallas native, is principal choreographer for the Louisville Ballet and resident choreographer for the Cincinnati Ballet. He has won both the Princess Grace Award and the Choo-San Goh Award for choreography and was named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to watch” for 2011.

Next on the program is Song Awakened, a sparingly elegant, richly detailed work set to the songs of Cesária Évora, a noted singer of Creole-Portuguese soul music. The work debuted to critical acclaim at New York’s Joyce Theater in 2001; The New York Times wrote that Buraczeski “makes his dancers voiceless musicians who use their bodies, alone and together, to add rhythms to (Evora’s).” The piece is presented in tribute to Ms. Évora, who passed away in December at age 70. Buraczeski, a nationally known jazz choreographer, has received commissions from such organizations as the Walker Art Center, the Library of Congress, and the American Dance Festival. He also has received multiple fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, for whom he is now a regular panelist/consultant.

Following intermission, the concert will feature the world premiere of The New You by Shen Wei, internationally renowned choreographer, director, dancer, designer and artistic director of New York-based Shen Wei Dance Arts. Shen Wei won the 2010 Meadows Prize from the Meadows School of the Arts, and created the interdisciplinary work from the ground up during his three-week Meadows Prize residency in January-February 2012.

The work includes nine dancers, two musicians, two actors, two art students and a computing- projection student. It is built on a code based on the numbers 0-30. Each number has its own “location” in space, and each dancer has created her own vocabulary of movements for each number. The numbers also correspond to letters of the alphabet; at one point the actors call out the numbers that make up a person’s name, and the dancers are able to then literally dance the name.

Shen Wei gave the dancers a particular assignment for their own names: after they created movement for the letters in their name, he had them write their signature in cursive, and told them to let the physical flow of their signature influence the way they danced the letters in their name. As a result, each dancer translated her own signature in dance movement.

In addition, the numbers correspond to musical notes played by the two musicians, a pianist and a cellist. In other parts of the work, artists fling and smear paint on a numbered Plexiglas sheet; dancers wear cameras that project images of those around them; and each dancer’s name is projected in a particular color of paint, in which the dancers dip themselves and then roll down a ramp.

“This work is about audiences experiencing new possibilities by building and revising systems that are sensed, but not necessarily known,” said Shen Wei. “Art opens doors we never thought had existed and enables us to access previously unknown dimensions.   By sensing different art forms, audiences can discover novel structural foundations and embark on a new journey. I hope this experience can offer the students and the viewers an alternative possibility of space.”

Spring Dance Concert performance times are 8:00 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday.  Tickets are $13 for adults, $10 for seniors and $7 for students, SMU faculty and staff.  Free parking is available at Hillcrest and Binkley or in the garage under the Meadows Museum.