KENNESAW, Ga. | Nov 19, 2018

Kennesaw State University’s Department of Dance will present “Pariah” on Nov. 30-Dec. 1 at 8:00 p.m. at the Dance Theater on the Marietta campus.

“Pariah” showcases innovative contemporary choreography by KSU Dance professors McCree O’Kelley, Andrea Knowlton, and Lisa Lock, as well as artist-in-residence Sean Nguyen-Hilton. The production includes an original score by James Waterman, music underscoring by Paul Stevens, and dancers from the KSU Dance Company.

The KSU Dance Company, a pre-professional dance company, performs not only on campus, but also regionally and nationally. Students who major or minor in dance have the opportunity to audition at the beginning of each semester to be a part of the company. Their mission is to bring concert dance to the community.

“I wanted to explore what it means to be an outcast,” said O’Kelley, assistant dance professor and choreographer of the title piece, in explaining what “Pariah” means to him. “I also wanted to explore the idea of ‘in order for me to be good, you need to be bad,’ or, ‘in order for me to win, I need for you to lose,’ and how that affects both the outcasts as well as the people who are doing the ostracizing.”

Assistant Dance Professor Lisa Lock, who choreographed “Walls” for the production, said, “I find that walls have a lot of connotations; they can be metaphors for several things in our lives. They can represent safety, or they can represent obstacles, or (they can represent) what can be a pure blank service to project your imagination.”

The KSU Dance Company is one of the few companies in the history of the American College Dance Association to have five national invitations to perform at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The dance program began at KSU in 2005 and has flourished into the largest collegiate dance program in Georgia. The Dance Theater on the Marietta campus, the performance home of KSU Dance, opened last year and is Atlanta’s first theater designed specifically for dance.