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The Front Row: "Love Your Mother"

Flatlands DanceTheatre Facebook Page

The Flatlands DanceTheatre is giving a performance this weekend that fits perfectly with Mother’s Day. Ali Duffy, associate professor of dance, joins the Front Row to give more information.

Tell us about how Flatlands DanceTheatre is different from the school of dance and what it actually does.

Flatlands DanceTheatre was founded in 2010. We are a professional contemporary dance company. Primarily we work in the community. We’re really trying to engage people who have danced in their lives and want to get back into it, or people who have graduated from Texas Tech primarily and want to keep dancing after graduation. So, we think it’s really important to keep dance in our community for adults and Flatlands has been a wonderful opportunity to do that.

Tell us about the upcoming production.

Well, it’s called “Love Your Mother,” and it’s all about motherhood. There are four choreographers working on this show and it’s truly a unified vision, more than any other show we’ve done so far, and I think because it’s so close to all of our hearts. We’re all four mothers, and we don’t represent all the mothers in the company, there are several. I’d say, maybe ten women in the company who are mothers. And we thought it was very important to represent women, to represent mothers and the experience of motherhood in a formal production.

So we explore different concepts around motherhood and few of the issues I dealt with were new motherhood, because that’s the closest to me. I have an almost two-year-old. So, new motherhood is on the brain. I also created a work called “My Wishes For You,” and I had the choreographers of Flatlands, who are mothers, describe what they wish for their children, and I made a dance about that. It was really delightful. We all cried and we all laughed. It’s just been a great experience.

Some other concepts that the choreographers are dealing with in their works include women’s bodies during pregnancy and once you become mothers, how the ownership of your body changes once you have a child, how your perceptions of your own body change and how its uses change…

Listen to the full interview at the top of the article.

Clinton Barrick is the Director of Programming for the network of stations that comprise Texas Tech Public Radio. He has served in this capacity for over twenty-five years, providing Classical Music to the airwaves of the South Plains and expanding Texas Tech Public Radio’s offering of news and cultural programs in response to station and network growth.