Bio/Newsletter/Press
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Donovan Dorrance hails from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he trained as a multi-instrumentalist. After earning a Bachelor's Degree at UNC, he moved to Brooklyn to work with Dorrance Dance, his sister’s dance company, later becoming music director and composing original music for the company. In 2016, he and Gregory Richardson received a New Music USA project grant to score Dorrance Dance's Myelination; they then released an album of the music under the moniker Prawn til Dante. After touring internationally with the company for six years, Dorrance moved back to North Carolina and continues to compose for dance and film, as well as produces and mixes music for other artists. He's released a few instrumental EPs as a solo artist and is currently working on a full length debut solo album that will be released in 2024. Dorrance's stylistic tendencies include groove-based minimalism, jazz-influenced house and hip-hop, 21st-century classical, progressive and post-rock, and leftfield electronic music.
Recent Interview with CanvasRebel
Photographs by Diego Quintanar.
For inquiries and collaborations, email donovan@donovandorrance.com
Press:
"Rhythm keeps accumulating and multiplying in “Myelination,” the Dorrance premiere; ... The live music — with vocals, piano, guitar, percussion and other instruments — is in a range of appealingly melodic jazz styles; its harmony with the dancing is never simple."
— Alastair Macaulay
“Then comes the revelatory “Myelination,” … It is complemented by a vibrant original score created by Donovan Dorrance and Gregory Richardson, with vocalist Aaron Marcellus (plus Nicholas Van Young on percussion in live performance).”
— Karen Campbell
“This 50-minute dance featured the full company, plus a muscular live jazz-rock score (credited to Donovan Dorrance, Gregory Richardson and the vocalist Aaron Marcellus).”
— Donald Hutera
“Kathy Kaufmann’s … lighting helped create that stark space, as did the ‘prepared piano’/drum composition by Donovan Dorrance (Michelle’s talented younger brother).”
- Caedra Scott-Flaherty, Observer
“As the dance progresses, to highly rhythmic and percussive music composed by Donovan Dorrance…, these individuals and groups essentially delivered a program that merged street dance with tap…”
- Jerry Hochman, Critical Dance
“The music, composed and played by Donovan Dorrance (piano), Aaron Marcellus (vocals, keyboard), Gregory Richardson (electric and upright bass), and Young (drums), runs like a sine curve — from wistful to high-spirited — through the dancers’ own acoustic accelerations and denouements.”
“And all this was bound together—indeed, allowed—by the consuming rhythms of her brother, Donovan Dorrance’s, music, like brain bark encasing this sparking, sparkling, muscular, joyous, ever-growing, organic miracle of tap.”
— Carolyn and Eli Newberger, The Berkshire Edge
“Dorrance Dance’s “Myelination” [is] a tap fantasia with dramatic and humorous overtones danced to scintillating jazz music by Prawn Til Dante (Donovan Dorrance and Gregory Richardson), played live by a band of six brilliant musicians, including the two composers.”
— Joel Benjamin, TheaterScene.net
“The score for Myelination, composed collaboratively by Dorrance’s brother Donovan playing lead keyboards and clarinet), Gregory Richardson (playing electric bass, acoustic bass, and clarinet), and Aaron Marcellus (on synthesizer and diverse, often wordless vocals), paired seamlessly with the dancers rhythmic compositions. The newly extended work relies heavily on non-standard meters, with extensive sections in 5/8, 7/8, and 2+2+2+3/8.”
— Laura Stanfield Prichard, Classical-Scene.com
