New on the schedule at the Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival this year: Performance Art.

Greater Reston Arts Center's 20th Annual Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival takes place Saturday and Sunday at Reston Town Center.

The arts festival is the largest, top-rated, juried, annual art festival in the Washington Metropolitan region, attracting over 50,000 patrons from across the region.  

In addition to the sculpture, painting, textiles and other art work on display, there will be  performances from regional performance arts/dance companies were hand-picked from a call for artist campaign organized by Reston Community Center and Dance/Metro DC, said event spokeswoman Maurisa Potts.

On the schedule:

Bowen McCauley Dance – will kick off the weekend celebrations with a performance at the Preview Party on Friday night.

 The company will perform two audience favorites: Falling Slowly from the famed Lucy’s Playlist which debuted in 2009 at Signature Theatre and A Smile to Hide the Pain a dance cabaret to music by Broadway’s Kander and Ebb.

 Daniel Burkholder / The PlayGround – is an improvisationally based performance group of dancers and musicians that combine the formalism of choreography with the immediacy of improvisation.  

Their unique work titled Primary/Scale involves performers placed in three distinct environments that overwhelms and surrounds them. The works include: Red, performed with 1,000 red bricks; Green, with 500 square feet of sod; and, Blue, performed in the Reston Town Center Fountain with 300 glasses.

Each performer will move, construct, destroy and manipulate their bodies, each other and the props to create an ever shifting landscape.

ClancyWorks Dance Company – is a contemporary modern dance company that shifts perceptions through performance. 

 Performing a piece titled Back to the Wall dancers face the wall as an opportunity as opposed to an obstacle.  Dancers will mount and partner with the wall in physically interesting and visually pleasing ways, with no harnesses or apparatuses – just strong physical partnering.   

UpRooted Dance – a contemporary dance company lead by Keira Hart-Mendoza.  Their work titled World Tree will incorporate a traditional Maypole constructed of a single pole with ribbons extending from its head.  UpRooted Dance will explore the concepts of folding, crossing, and growing, all while in a circular setting. 

Tzveta Kassabova – Bulgaria born Tzveta Kassabova views dance as a visual art form.  She has always been fascinated by the concept of space, and is constantly trying to address it, both in her choreography and design. 

 Pavilion Garden is a work designed specifically for the festival.  The five-hour long installation piece will take place where twenty performers will criss-cross in slow motion colorful ribbons within the three dimensional structure of the Town Center pavilion. 

 The ribbons create a large-scale piece of art highlighting the pavilion’s beautiful architecture.  The vastly different time signature will illuminate the pedestrian, task oriented activities of the dancers and will make each detail memorable. 

Jane Franklin Dance Company – this Arlington based group, crosses disciplines in partnership with music, media, visual artists and community participants.  Incidence, will feature a life-size kinetic sculpture that is manipulated by the dancers to create changes in the performance environment. 

 The piece has a circular orientation and is dependent on the physical configurations of the sculpture, and the way it changes from being a vertical structure to a horizontal one. It can be viewed from all points as dancers and sculpture follow the non-linear trajectory of chance.

Musical Line Up

The festival also announces the 2011 musical line-up featuring Americana rock singer/songwriter Jason Lane Byrd; blues duo The McTell Brothers;  popular folk singer Dulcie Taylor;  Songwriters Association of Washington President Jean Bayou;  bluesy Gina de Simone and Pat Quinn;  and the hypnotic youthful rock sounds of Margot MacDonald. 

To see a complete entertainment schedule and lineup, click here.

There is no additional charge for performances. Festival admission is free, but a  voluntary donation of $10 to GRACE at the event’s Art Carts, individuals will receive a $10 gift certificate to dine at participating Reston Town Center restaurants.