When director and choreographer Joe Goode created Hometown, a dance work that explores the idea of home, he made sure to not forget one particular group of people – those who have been deprived of the traditional idea.

The Joe Goode Performance Group gave video cameras to a group of San Francisco teenagers who grew up in homeless shelters or foster care and asked them to record their version of home. The resulting videos showed broken glass and abandoned buildings rather than colorful Victorian houses on the San Francisco Bay. The videos were later turned into large-scale projections to be used as backgrounds for dancers who depict quaint, picket-fence visions of home.

“It’s kind of a counterpoint to the romantic notion of Hometown,” Goode says.

Hometown, the third installment in Goode’s dance trilogy about the extraordinary lives of seemingly ordinary people, is the perfect performance to kick off the spring semester Friday and Saturday at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. The performances are continuing this season’s theme of “Defining Moments” – the points in time that define and shape a person, Communications Coordinator Laura Mertens says.

“Our programming this semester continues to look back at some of those moments in our collective history and encourages people to reflect on their own defining moments, perhaps even experience new ones,” Mertens says.

Some of this semester’s events, such as the American Piano Festival in March, deal with the moments that define an entire country.

Each day of the festival, held March 7 to March 12, features a performance illuminating a different aspect of American piano music tied to American culture.

The festival focuses on jazz piano as much as classical piano, celebrating African-American virtuosos like Art Tatum and Jelly Roll Morton, says Joseph Horowitz, who is hosting the program along with Jennifer DeLapp.

“People who have never heard Art Tatum played live, it’s a jaw-dropping experience,” Horowitz says.

The New Orleans jazz group Bleu Orleans (you might recognize some as Jamie Foxx’s band mates in Ray) also celebrates the uniquely American musical style Feb. 4 in Aural Gumbo: New Orleans Jazz for the New Millennium, a concert that uses music to trace the hurricane-ravaged city’s unique heritage.

The theatre department’s spring lineup explores moments in personal and cultural history. One theater student will act with the famous radio theater company, L.A. Theatre Works, Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 in The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial, a production adapted from transcripts of the 1925 trial that pitted evolution against creationism.

Arthur Miller’s classic drama The Crucible, running in March, compares the Salem witch trials to former Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hunt for communists. James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner, which explores the impact of religion on the black family, ends the semester.

The department will also collaborate with Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company next month to stage Savage in Limbo, a play by Pulitzer Prize winner and Moonstruck author John Patrick Shanley that shows what happens when you throw five thirty-somethings having identity crises into a bar in the Bronx.

The semester’s opera lineup falls under the “Defining Moments” umbrella as well. The Maryland Opera Studio will end April by setting Il Matrimonio Segreto (The Secret Marriage) in the 1960s (the opera was originally written to be set in 1750s Italy). Director Nick Olcott knows if you’re going to set an opera in the ’60s, you can’t help making the most of it. The costumes are reminiscent of the early Pink Panther movies, he says, and the set features Vespa scooters and, somehow, a swimming pool on stage.

“I think it’s going to be a lot of fun, and I think this is going to be a perfect performance for people who hate opera,” Olcott says.

For those who stick around after the semester ends, Opera Lafayette will perform Mozart’s Idomeneo, rè di Creta June 2 and 3 in honor of the composer’s 250th birthday. But if you can’t stay for the opera, don’t worry. You can still catch the humorous tribute to the classical giant, Happy Birthday, Mozart next month.

It just goes to show CSPAC can’t approach even the most traditional material conventionally, which should make for quite the entertaining semester.

Contact reporter Alia Malik at malikdbk@gmail.com.