HARRISBURG – “The StepCrew,” featuring Irish stepdance, Ottawa Valley stepdance and tap, will perform at Live at Rose Lehrman on Tuesday, March 19, 2013, at 7:30 p.m. at the Rose Lehrman Arts Center on the Harrisburg Campus of HACC, Central Pennsylvania’s Community College.The StepCrew’s high-energy performance features 12 artists with dance, fiddle, vocal and musical expertise. The dancers showcase the respective traditional dance forms of stepdance and tap, while also creating brand new, modern fusions of all the styles. A five-piece band, including Celtic vocals and award-winning fiddlers, completes the ensemble.
The performers of “The StepCrew” also hail from other well-known groups, including Cara Butler, an Irish step dancer known as the principal female dancer with six-time Grammy Award winners “The Chieftains.” Butler’s sister Jean is the original principal female performer in “Riverdance,” and the sisters have collaborated on another Irish dance show entitled, “Dancing on Dangerous Ground.”
Two other StepCrew members, brothers Jon and Nathan Pilatzke, have also performed with “The Chieftains” in a variety of settings, including o “Late Night with David Letterman” and the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize Awards. The brothers highlight the Ottawa Valley form of stepdancing, and Jon described the different dancing styles in an interview with The Dayton City newspaper: “With tap, you’ve got the upper body (moving) … with its arm movements on more of a theatrical kind of plane. Then you have the Irish, which traditionally has very little movement in the upper body and then the Ottawa Valley…which is crazy all together.”
Other members of the “The StepCrew” include Dan Stacey, Sarah Uddin, Christine Carr, Alyth McCormack, Jeffrey McLarnon, Julie Fitzgerald, Rob Becker, Kirk White and Gabriel Donohue. The group has received high praise from reviewers, with the Palm Beach Daily News saying, “The StepCrew offer and captivatingly share its own exuberant, delicious and most importantly unpretentious feast of genuinely authentic musical performance in the form of Irish stepdancing, Ottawa Valley stepdancing and modern tap.”
Show tickets are $38 for adults and $19 for students. To order tickets, call 717-231-ROSE (7673) or go to www.LiveatRoseLehrman.org.
“The StepCrew” is sponsored by the Lois Lehrman Grass Foundation; Oxford Hall; The Hershey Co.; McCormick Family Foundation; The HACC Foundation; The Foundation for Enhancing Communities – Rose Lehrman Fund; and The Franklin H. and Ruth L. Wells Foundation. Grant support is provided by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Richmond Foundation administered through the PNC Charitable Trust Grant Review Committee. Media sponsors for the event are Lamar Advertising and WHTM-TV abc27.
