Dance - Spiral bound

The Coriolis Effect, in layman’s terms, is the natural phenomenon that makes your bathwater drain to the left in Atlanta but to the right in Argentina. It has to do with the way the Earth’s rotation makes the path of moving objects curve, a dynamic allusion that Elizabeth Dishman had in mind when naming her new Coriolis Dance Project.

“I just fell in love with the concept of spiraling movement and the rotation of the Earth causing this beautiful action just in physics,” Dishman says. “As I thought more about it in relation to dance, I realized that it really did match what I do in my body a lot as a choreographer and what I ask my dancers to do.”

Dishman launches her new dance company this week with Coriolis: Dances for a Season, which features three new works. Despite its moniker, the program’s connection with the holiday season is obvious only in the first segment. “Hodie,” a dance Dishman choreographed for six women, is set to one of her favorite childhood Christmas songs, Benjamin Britten’s “A Ceremony of Carols.” Dishman performs solo in the second segment, “Written,” choreographed by New York-based dancer Violette Tucker. Dances for the Season finishes with “Trinity,” a work Dishman says evokes a “spiritual flavor, if not necessarily a concrete theme or obvious story or meaning.”

An Emory graduate who returned to Atlanta last year after receiving her master’s degree in dance from Ohio State University, Dishman says the Atlanta dance community has matured in her absence.

“Atlanta’s a strange dance scene. It tends to be kind of transient. So in that way, it’s changed because some people have left and some people have come. But I think it’s getting more full if not more stable,” she says.

Coriolis Dance Project presents Coriolis: Dances for a Season at 7 Stages, 1105 Euclid Ave., Dec. 6-9 and Dec. 13-16 at 8 p.m. Sun. matinees at 2 p.m. $8-$10. 404-523-7647.??