Malpaso Dance Company + Arturo O’Farrill & the Afro Latin Jazz Ensemble • ‘Dreaming of Lions’

Friday, February 24, 2017 | 8:00 pm

Reynolds Industries Theater

Thanks to thawing relations between the U.S. and Cuba, the prodigiously talented Malpaso Dance Company of Havana has started to appear more frequently on American stages. Central to Malpaso’s rising profile is their relationship with the New York-based Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, which has won two GRAMMY awards under bandleader Arturo O’Farrill. The ten-piece Afro Latin Jazz Ensemble (ALJE), featuring members of the Orchestra, “embraces music from across the Americas, playing all of its diverse material with the same precision and fire it brings to a mambo workout” (The New York Times).

Malpaso and the ALJE come to Duke with the U.S. premiere of Dreaming of Lions, in which ten musicians and ten dancers present an evening-length evocation of Ernest Hemingway’s classic 1952 novella The Old Man and the Sea. Choreographer Osnel Delgado draws on ballet and Cuban dance in depicting the tale of a fisherman’s quest to catch an elusive marlin, using a different movement vocabulary to delineate each character in the story. The work wrestles with themes of honor, determination, and loss through one man’s crusade for victory in the unrelenting sea.

Malpaso Dance Company is an Associate Company of Joyce Theater Productions.