Category Archives: modern

Moving Dialogs Series

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Moving Dialogs curator Baracka de Soleil. Photo by Jacob Bell.

Diversity seems to be the word on everyone’s lips these days. Shirley Mordine, director of Mordine & Co., spoke about the need to diversify by asking other companies to perform with her company at last week’s performances. Numerous small companies across Chicago are sharing shows with other artists in alternative spaces in increasing frequency. Rumors have the Dance Center of Columbia College looking to diversify their academic programming to include a broader spectrum of styles including African and hip hop. Local dance service organization Audience Architects held several convenings gathering artists opinions and data on diversity of dance in Chicago. And then there is the Chicago Cultural Plan – the big daddy study on arts and diversity in the Windy City.

But it was a conversation with Audience Architects Executive Director Heather Hartley and artist/teacher/consultant Baraka de Soleil that sparked the idea for a new, six-part series called Moving Dialogs: Diversity + Dance. de Soleil said the community convenings came out of the fact that local artists who attended the 2012 Dance/USA conference weren’t satisfied with the conversation about diversity. “We were either trying to be too nice or it was being diluted,” he said. “There are things we didn’t want to talk about. It’s very challenging. Through the genius of Audience Architects, bridging the conversations between audiences and those who construct the work is a wonderful way to begin to make the conversation larger.” The free series opens this Sunday, March 10 with Diversity: Then/Now at the Old Town School of Folk Music.

de Soleil, who grew up on the South Side and has performed as an interdisciplinary artist in Minnesota, San Francisco and New York, will be the curator for the entire series. The inaugural Spring Series will focus on Chicago’s history and the current cultural climate of the local and national dance scene. A panel of artists – Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre‘s artistic director Robert Battle, Columbia College chair Onye Ozuzu, dance critic Lucia Mauro, dance education director for Old Town School Sarah Dandelles, Cerqua Rivera artistic director Wilfredo Rivera, DanceWorks Chicago artistic director Julie Nakagawa and emerging artists NIC K and Dorian Rhea –  will participate in the discussion, bringing their expertise to the table.

I spoke with de Soleil over the phone last week about Moving Dialogs and the opening series.

How did you decide who would be on the panel?

Timelines, relevance and cultivating relationships. The people who are a part of this opening forum are people I’ve had time to get to know and have conversations and hear where they’re at. This came out of conversations, not necessarily about diversity, but what are the ways we can come together and strategize. The representation of emerging artists is important. They’re beginning to think about ways of diverstiy that are multi-layered. They’re just doing it. They aren’t talking about it. We need to hear these voices and they’ll teach us something. It’s important that the experience is somewhat multi-generational, but that it’s a coalition of the multiple voices, multiple ages and multiple experiences all looking towards discovering this language about how we can think and break open the notion of diversity. It was synergy. It was timing. It was relevance.

What kind of information are you hoping to get and what will you do with that information?

We want to begin to discover, as a community, the best language that supports moving this conversation about diversity along and that it moves us beyond the notion of diversity as a deficit, as something marginalized, as something now that has been relegated to our legacies. We need something to move us out of that place and that there is a co-existence of these diverse thoughts. It’s a big challenge. Above and beyond just representation of having different people in the room is the line their diverse and distinctive bodies to co-exist and to speak from that place of co-existence. You can be there and I can be there. We can both have our opinions, but a new language that allows us to both be there. This first one is an inroads of how we can begin to talk about diversity. It’s not attainable; it’s already there. We’re just beginning to name it and allow it to co-exist and to allow the diverse voices to co-exist in a new way that everyone can share and be their true selves, adding to the conversation. Who is in the room will inform the conversation. I have a legacy and a past that reflects who I am culturally. I’m going to allow myself to be deeply present in this moment and ask others to be deeply present in themselves and that is what is going to inform it. There is this conversation, but there will be iterations that move it and propel it forward, so we won’t be stuck in this conversation.

Read more about Moving Dialogs with a Moving Reflections blog entry by Hubbard Street Communications Manager Zac Whittenburg.

Moving Dialogs Diversity: Then/Now, Sunday, March 10 from 6:30-8 pm at the Old Town School of Folk Music, 4545 N. Lincoln Ave in the Myron R. Szold Music and Dance Hall. Admission is free. RSVP IS REQUIRED.

Mordine & Company Diversify

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Mordine & Company dancers. Photo by Cheryl Mann.

“I think of the audience as the other part of the art form. Without you, there is no art form,” Shirley Mordine said before her company’s shared program at Stage 773 Friday evening. Mordine & Co. took the stage along with flamenco group Clinard Dance Theatre in an interesting mix of dance diversity. Mordine said the idea came from attending Dance/USA conferences and noticing how another host city (San Francisco) showed a more diverse section of their city’s companies than Chicago did the year we hosted. Deeply Rooted Dance Theatre shares the bill for Saturday and Sunday performances.

Mordine’s 2011 Life Speak about the art of storytelling got a revamp with a larger, vibrant cast. The original cast had seasoned dancers that were earthy and grounded in the work. The 2013 cast, which bumped up from six to eight dancers, boasted a younger cast with solid technique that made interesting choices to make the work their own. The stage sounded like sandpaper (a dancer who had performed their previously said it was painted wood, no marley) adding an extra audible texture to the work.

Clinard’s From the Arctic to the Middle East (Broken Narratives by an American Flamenco Dancer) was a blend of traditional flamenco with contemporary flavor, plus live musicians, a singer and a voice over telling a poem or story. The dancing and the live accompaniment were at the top of their game, but drowned out the voice over, so it was difficult to tell what the story was about. The three women seemed to represent different emotions (angry, sad, lost?) in different stages of life. A swaying hug between two dancers seemed maternal and comforting only to have one break away and spin out of control. Wendy Clinard showed amazingly fast footwork in a brilliant solo.

After a brief intermission, Mordine & Co. took the stage for the premiere of All At Once/Acts Of Renewal. Press materials state the new work is about “…the ability and need to process a deluge of information in the digital age”. Dressed in white with the women wearing bright colored leotards underneath, the costumes might have represented white noise or the sense that with so much information coming at you, you really can’t hear it at all. A slow-motion sequence perhaps suggests we all need to slow down. The short piece needs to flesh out more of the themes in the movement for better clarity and unity. It felt more like a work-in-progress than a premiere.

Final show of Mordine & Co. with Deeply Rooted Dance Theatre is this afternoon at 3 p.m. Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont. 773.327.5252.

Preview: The Dance COLEctive “free[Bound]”

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TDC Artistic Director Margi Cole at age 13.

This weekend The Dance COLEctive (TDC) presents free [Bound] in four performances featuring two premieres and a revival from the company’s 13th season. For the first time, TDC will be performing at Stage 773 in Lakeview. “It’s a nice, intimate setting,” said artistic director Margi Cole. “I think my work is better served in a smaller theater.”

In a fun marketing campaign for the show, TDC posted pictures of the dancers at age 13 on their Facebook page, a nod to Cole’s 2009 work 13, which is being restaged for the performances this week. According to Cole, “13 is: awkward moments, about being embarrassed, trying to own who you are and be ok with it, as well as the pros and cons and uncomfortable situations of being age 13.” Spoken text – the final monologue was written by her niece at age 14 – adds to the texture and character of the work.

A new work by Cole, in orderly fashion, places limitations on the seven dancers to create an uncomfortable, disconnected feel. “I wanted the feeling of being a commuter, of going from point to point without having any intimacy,” Cole said. “We made a ‘contract’…basically a list of things we wouldn’t or couldn’t do. Each dancer’s was different and then they had to come together to negotiate how to do the material.” She admits this proved for a frustrating process at times, but the result was movement charged with a weird energy. “We usually spend a lot of time working on making the movement comfortable, but not this time. I’m ok with that…I’m not sure they are.”

Also on the program is a new solo work created on Cole by choreographer Molly Shanahan. The two previously worked together when Cole danced for Shanahan’s company Mad Shak in the ’90s. Shanahan is currently studying for a PhD in Dance at Temple University in Pennsylvania. The solo, titled Leaving & Wanting, deals with major life changes and the emotional, physical and psychological repercussions they may bring. While the two worked together over the summer, Shanahan’s mother passed away. Add to that the fact that Shanahan was preparing to move and the heatwave they were rehearsing in and, as Cole said, “There was a lot going on.” Aside from these challenges, the two clearly respect each other and enjoyed working together. Cole describes the process as humbling, satisfying and challenging. “The hard part is the transformative, performative element,” she said. Say what? “Molly talks about the audience being a witness. Trying to be transparent, while being in the moment and not performing it…it’s hard.”

The Dance COLEctive presents free [Bound] at Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont Ave., Thursday-Saturday, Jan. 17-19 at 8 p.m. and Sunday, Jan. 20 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $25, $20 for students. Call 773.327.5252 or visit http://bit.ly/SszbAg.

 

dropshift dance explores memory through movement

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dropshift dance's Andrea Cerniglia. Photo courtesy of Dear Prudence Photography.

What is a memento? How do you define that? How does your perception change when you get further away from the source? These are some of the questions “artistic architect” and dancer Andrea Cerniglia asks in Catch and Release presented this weekend at The Hairpin Arts Center. In this new program, her company, dropshift dance, explores memory perception and recall by creating an interactive performance experience with dancers, roving musicians and textile artwork. The goal is to create a balance between the three disciplines, while letting the audience decide how they view the show.

This non-traditional platform altering how and what the audience sees by letting them control the watch time and viewpoint is something she’s been experimenting with recently during her ninth season with Zephyr Dance. Although she’s been with the local company since 2004, after stints with RTG Dance and Chicago Moving Company, Cerniglia, 32, started presenting her own work in 2010. “I have a point of view and to develop that, I have to produce my own work”, she said. “It was a gradual process, but it was the next logical step.” As director, or architect, she wears many hats, but is learning and growing in the process. An example is the much-dreaded deed of grant writing. “It’s tedious, but a necessary evil,” said Cerniglia. “You do so many edits that it forces you to be more articulate. I’ve learned a lot about myself and became a better writer.”

Along with Cerniglia in Catch and Release will be three dancers, musicians Weldon Anderson (double bass) and Bob Kessler (harmonica, acoustic and electronic loopers), moving through textiles/sets by artist Ashley Sullivan with costumes (and set consultation) by Heiki Dakter. “The way that the performance space is set up will allow the viewer to literally be caught in one moment, while having the opportunity to release themselves and go view something else,” she says. “At times, the audience will have to choose how long to stay with a certain part of the performance as overlap may suggest that they leave one part of the space to go see another.”

dropshift dance presents Catch and Release, Friday-Sunday at The Hairpin Arts Center, 2800 N. Milwaukee Ave.  Friday – Sunday, Nov. 9-11 at 7:30 pm. Tickets are $20, students and seniors $15, visit brownpapertickets.com.

Preview: A Correct Likeness

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Dancer Amanda Dye of Leopold Group. Photo by Jessie Young.

This weekend the Leopold Group, along with Bread and Roses Productions will present an evening of dance and photography at the Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery. A Correct Likeness, curated by Leopold Group artistic director Lizzie Leopold, explores “the intersection of dance and photography”. More like an art installation than a traditional dance concert, the performance interweaves dancers, photography, video cameras and live musicians (electronic duo Hard R), while the audience moves through the space at their leisure. Video and photos taken this weekend may also be included in the subsequent performance scheduled for December 1st and 2nd.

The three featured photographers – Arn Klein, Matthew Gregory Hollis and Jessie Young – each shot the six dancers over the past year. Once in the space on Saturday, they will lay out all the photographs and, with Leopold, decide where to hang them, intermingling artistic visions as the dancers and audience will later intermingle with the photographic stills. Young, also a dancer, has worked with Leopold before and brings a choreographic eye to her pictures. I spoke with Young over the phone earlier this week.

How did you hook up with Lizzie for this particular project?

She was a participant on a project that I did last year called “Blue Space”. I invited people, some I knew and some I didn’t know, to have their portrait taken in…it was an old bedroom of mine, but the idea was that the walls of the room were all blue. They would be in this space and I would take pictures of them doing whatever they wanted. At the end of the project, I would have these portraits and they would all have the same background color. That started two ideas for me. The first was getting into some kind of idea or motive and repetitively working with that idea, then allow the difference in that situation be more about the people that come into it. For this project, I had the dancers wear the leotards they are wearing for the show. They came over to my house and we went into my alley. They each had their own bag of powdered sugar and I would cover them in powdered sugar and take their photos. The interest in the sugar is more because of the texture. When they have it on, it would have this sense..it looks like sand. No one that has scene the photos knows it’s powdered sugar, unless they were there. There were a number of different elements that I wanted to do with them. It’s almost like asking someone to put on a mask. It kind tends to unlock and show different parts of a personality of a person. It’s hard to get into a photo shoot sometimes. The first 15 minutes, you’re breaking the ice. I wasn’t worried about breaking the ice with these girls. I’d worked with a lot of them and I know many of them. I did want to start to see them in a different way and I did want to see themselves in a different way. Beyond that, the reason I liked the powdered sugar is that it’s so light. Any movement or gesture, it casts this kind of wave of powder around them, so you can see the movement. You can see the echo of a movement because of the powder flying off. It was a very beautiful thing to capture with my camera, because I could see a movement, but I could also capture all of the powder around that movement.

How does being both a dancer and a photographer affect the way you see/watch dance or photograph?

I definitely feel like I photograph like a dancer. I think of movement direction and movement qualities before I would think of any variation. I add variation after I’ve taken the photograph. I’m not giving them any kind of context. All the direction during the photo shoot is completely movement. Afterward, when I look at the photograph, I can see relationships and get highlight that with the way I edit, but I’m still connected to it in terms of movement vocabulary. It will be interesting to see these girls that have done movement that I’ve directed, captured on the walls in a space where they’re doing movement that Lizzie’s directed.

Leopold Group with Bread and Roses Production presents A Correct Likeness, Saturday, Oct. 27 at 8 pm and Sunday, Oct 28 at 5 pm at the Defibrillator Gallery, 1136 N. Milwaukee Ave. Tickets ($20) are available at the door or visit www.brownpapertickets.com/event/264244.

CDF 12: Dancing East & West of Chicago

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CDF 12 Giordano Dance Chicago in Alexander Ekman's "Two Become Three". Photo by Cheryl Mann.

The Chicago Dancing Festival continued last night with the Dancing East and West of Chicago program at the Auditorium Theatre at Roosevelt University.  Where Monday night’s Chicago Dancing show focused on local talent, Wednesday’s show featured companies from around the country.  The East was represented by Brian Brooks Moving Company and Martha Graham Dance Company, both from New York, and the West by Ballet Arizona, San Francisco Ballet (SFB) and Pacific Northwest Ballet (PNB) from Seattle.  Not only did the program represent dance companies from coast-to-coast, but the works presented spanned centuries from the 1890 classical ballet (Sleeping Beauty pas de deux) to 2011 postmodern (Brooks’ Descent).

Brook’s piece began with dancers carrying one another across the stage across their backs in a 45-degree plank.  The patterns were a meditation in strength and balance, but the most intriguing moments happened with props.  Dancers waving flat boards created wind gusts that animated pieces of tulle.  The effect was like the movie American Beauty, where the paper bag danced in the wind. Here, the fabric was doing the dancing, while the dancers did the grunt work. It was beautiful.  The other New York contingent presented an all-female work about reactions to war.  Chronicle (1936) highlights the strength of women with Graham’s signature contractions, pitches, cupped hands and severe drama.  The Red Shroud solo performed by Blakeley White-McGuire was particularly intense.  Ladies – fierceness be thy name.

A last-minute Midwest addition to the program was Alexander Ekman’s Two Becomes Three performed by two dancers from Giordano Dance Chicago (GDC).  Maeghan McHale and Martin Ortiz Tapia danced this quirky duet on Monday night at the Harris Theater.  They were delightful then and even better last night.  The audience loved them.

Although only one of the three ballet companies performed a work by George Balanchine, they all have ties to the famous Russian choreographer.  The artistic directors of Ballet Arizona (Ib Andersen), SFB (Helgi Tomasson) and PNB (Peter Boal) all danced for the company Balanchine founded, the New York City Ballet (NYCB).  All three have Balanchine works in their rep and employ dancers that fit in the quintessential Balanchine ballerina mold (read: short waists, long legs, gorgeous feet).  His trademark fast footwork and neo-classical style were on full display in the opening number by Ballet Arizona.  Rubies, an excerpt from his three-part ballet Jewels (1967) was pertly performed by the petite cast – except for soloist Kenna Draxton, who towered above the rest.  The tableau of 15 dancers in a semi circle, dressed in ruby red costumes, hands joined above their heads as the curtain opened was stunning.  What followed was a whirlwind of delight.  Shout out to Jillian Barrel and Nayon Iovino, quite the dynamic duo.

PNB dancers Lesley Rausch and Seth Orza beautifully performed Jerome Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun (1953), which is set in an abstract dance studio with the audience serves as the mirror.  The haunting score by Claude Debussy lends a melancholic tone to the duet where the dancers seem more interested in their reflections than each other.  While this pas was more casual in tone and in dress (leotard and tights with hair down for her, tights and bare-chested for him), the Sleeping Beauty pas de deux, performed by SFB’s Sofiane Sylve and Vito Mazzeo, was full-out formal.  Normally danced at the end of the nearly three-hour ballet, this duet represents the marriage of the princess to her prince.  The sparkling tiara, tutu and tunic couldn’t out-dazzle this couple.  They were spectacular.

There was one slip up – literally – in last night’s show that I must mention, because I think it was the turning point -wow, no more puns I promise – of the show.  During the Beauty pas, Sylve slipped and fell.  Not just a “whoops!”, but a crash-and-burn on her…um, tutu.  The shock of it had made the audience gasp loudly, but Sylve got right up and finished with the grace and talent of the true professional she is.  I’m (almost) glad this happened for three reasons.  1. Shit happens –  when it does, you get back up and continue on.  2. It proves she’s human.  3.  It not only shows the audience, which more than likely had some ballet newcomers in it, that the stage was slick, but if a ballerina of this caliber can fall just walking to the upstage corner of the stage, it shows just how difficult it is be to dance a difficult pas in pointe shoes.  The slip upped the respect of the audience tenfold, because she made the rest of it look utterly effortless.

 

Chicago Dancing Festival 2012

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Martha Graham Dance Co dancer Xiaochuan Xie on the Pritzker stage.

The Chicago Dancing Festival (CDF) hits Chicago stages for a week of free dance performances again this August.  Now in its sixth year, CDF – the brainchild of Lar Lubovitch and Jay Franke – is expanding (again) to six days of events with new programs and a couple of commissioned world premieres to boot!  RB will be part of CDF’s blogger initiative for the second year, bringing you sneak peeks, dancer/choreographer interviews, event coverage, reviews and wrap ups.  I’ll also be live-Tweeting pre- and post-event coverage for the Fest complete with photos, behind-the-scenes happenings and audience quotes.

New to the fest this year is an all-Chicago program, Chicago Dancing, featuring local faves Hubbard Street Dance Chicago (HSDC) and Joffrey Ballet and three CDF commissioned works.  Giordano Dance Chicago (note the new name!) makes its CDF debut in a work by Swedish choreographer Alexander Ekman.  New York-based choreographer Nicholas Leichter will work with the After School Matters students to create a world premiere honoring the memory of Maggie Daley, former first lady of Chicago, who started the program in 1991.  A two-week residency led by Larry Keigwin blends dancers and non-dancers from Chicago into a world premiere, Bolero Chicago.  Keigwin’s new work, set to Ravel’s most famous score, will incorporate local movement traits for a uniquely Chicago piece.  New groups performing at the fest this year include Pacific Northwest Ballet and Ballet Arizona, along with returning companies San Francisco Ballet, Houston Ballet, New York City Ballet, Martha Graham Dance Company and Brian Brooks Moving Company.

A partnership with Chicago SummerDance, the city’s outdoor dancing series, for Dancing Under the Stars and prolific local dance writer Zac Whittenburg leads a lecture demonstration, Chicago Now, with local companies at the MCA Stage.  Programming for both of these event to be announced at a later date.   A day of Dancing Movies also takes place at the MCA with films including PINA, All Is Not Lost, Two Seconds After the Laughter and Fanfare for Marching Band curated by local artist Sarah Best.  The fest always ends with a Celebration of Dance at the outdoor Pritzker Pavilion stage in Millennium Park showcasing a number of artists that have performed throughout the week.

Tickets for all of the events are free, however, you do need to reserve seating for the indoor theaters in advance.  These will “sell out” very fast!  More information on tickets will be available the week of July 16th.

East Meets West

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The Seldoms dancers. Photo by Brian Kuhlmann.

Later this month, local modern company The Seldoms takes the stage with WCdance from Taiwan.  Read my preview of the show in Windy City Times here.

The Seldoms with WCdance at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts, Thurs – Sat, June 28-30 at 8 pm and Sunday, July 1 at 3 pm.  Tickets are $20 ($15 for students and seniors).  Call 312.337.6543 or visit www.brownpapertickets.com/event/246618

She’s Really Gone!

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Pointe shoes, electric guitars, muscle and fierce art collide on the MCA Stage this weekend.  Karole Armitage, dubbed the “punk ballerina” in 1984 by Vanity Fair Magazine brings her troupe to Chicago as a compliment to the museum’s exhibition This Will Have Been:  Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s.  After taking a break from her company Armitage Ballet for 15 years while working in Europe, she came back to revive and rename the group Armitage Gone! Dance in 2005.  Why gone?  “One of the early pieces I did, almost my first piece was called Gone (A Real Gone Dance – 1982),” Armitage said.  “I feel like I’m gone from the mainstream, I’m gone from the predictable, I’m often just plain gone.  It’s also a hipster term from the 50’s, like ‘she’s a real gone gal’.  I liked the multiple meanings.  I just didn’t want to take myself so seriously.” This woman that doesn’t take herself seriously, it seems, has done it all.  She’s danced for George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham, started her own company, lived in Europe for 15 years choreographing and directing companies, re-started her own company, worked with Mikhail Baryshnikov, Rudolph Nureyev and Michael Jackson, choreographed Madonna’s Vogue video, received a Tony nomination for choreographing the Broadway revival of Hair and is currently choreographing the newest Cirque du Soleil tent show in Montreal.  “It’s funny.  In my career, I’ve worked with children, singers, dancers a now every kind of acrobat and very shortly I’ll be working with William Wegman on a dog ballet, so I’m adding animals to my list,” she said.  “I’ve covered the spectrum now.”

For the MCA appearance, the company’s first since 2008, AGD revives two of Armitage’s 80’s works –  Drastic-Classicism (1981) and The Watteau Duets (1985) – and her 2011 piece GAGA-Gaku.  The Rogue Ballerina talked with the Punk Ballerina over the phone one Sunday afternoon.  Here are some excerpts from our fascinating conversation.

You were born in Wisconsin and grew up in Kansas and Colorado.  How did you end up in Switzerland for your first job?

I started taking ballet when I was 4 years old in Kansas with a woman from New York City Ballet, so I was bitten by the magic of the art form.  At age 12 or 13, everyone was saying to be really serious, you have to go study full-time, you can’t just take class in Kansas.   So I went to the School of American Ballet in NY in the summer.  I started going to junior high and high school at the North Carolina School for the Arts.  That was the only school in the U.S. both academics and very serious artistic, performing arts training at the time.  Summers were in NY.  Balanchine fell in love with Suzanne Farrell and she got married to someone else, so he decided to move part-time to Switzerland to escape his lovelorn state and he took all of us from the graduating class with him to Switzerland.  That’s how I got there, by a kind of fluke. 

And then you went to dance with Merce.  What made you want to make that jump?

I always loved doing the leotard ballets by Balanchine ( “Agon”, “The Four Temperaments”) that were really more modern.  Psychologically, I was a modern woman. I never felt comfortable, at that age, putting on a tutu and being kind of European.  It didn’t make sense to me, so why not do something even more modern, more of my time.  I’d never seen Cunningham, I’d never studied modern dance.  I went and took a class and I just loved it.  It used all of the technique you have in ballet, plus new thinking about movement and music.  It was a very exciting place to confront ideas.

Had you always been interested in choreography?

I never really thought about becoming a choreographer or anything.  I just thought there was no one doing what I imagined dance to be.  There was this oozing gap and I just decided to try and people really liked it.  I thought I’d probably only do one piece.  It was just an experiment and it just kind of snowballed.  I was asked to another piece and another piece, then Paris Opera asked me…it all happened in an organic, unexpected way. 

What do you look for in a dancer?

I do love technique.  The more skill that way, the better because I think it gives you freedom.  You can just carve it and not even think about it.  I like virtuosity. I like being able to see the body go to the absolute with new dimensions of movement.  Technique is important for that freedom, but only if it is a real person living inside that body that has something to say.  I’m not interested in virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake.  I really look for personality and imagination.  People who are daring, who are willing to participate in a the creative process that the rules are unknown…it takes people who really have courage and are willing to go down these unknown paths.  It’s very hard to find dancers who combine all of those qualities.  Looking at the whole company, it’s like each person is a different spice and I’m always trying to make a beautiful meal.  I don’t want two people that are alike.  I want people who are different.

Everything I’ve been reading about Drastic-Classicism says it is an iconic work.  Why was it such a big deal in 1981?

There are electric guitars on stage. It used Cunningham technique in the model of Balanchine, so a new vocabulary was born.  In addition to that, it really had this raw, theatricality and wildness and jubilation of destruction.  That punk feeling.  It’s a very youthful piece.  It’s very free-spirited.  Sometimes the guitars are used as partners.  It really was punk, modern dance and ballet put together.  That was a very new idea. 

With the two revivals, did you change anything?

 There’s not a great video, so every step isn’t exactly as it used to be.  The dancers in my company weren’t even born yet!  That was about the spirit of counter-culture and the joy of being marginal.  There is no counter-culture now.  Their inner life is different.  I don’t know how to recreate literally that spirit and put it into people.  They’re different people, so it’s somewhat different.  That’s one of the extraordinary things about dance, it’s so of its moment. That’s a great part of its power.  It gets you in touch with now.  Being in the moment and feeling our time. We change – even though the notes are the same, it comes out different.  It’s as close as I knew how to do it.  The Watteau Duets is a little easier to revive.  It was me and one partner, so it’s quite the same.  It’s a relationship from attraction to romance to erotic complicity to neurosis.  It’s been fascinating to work with my dancers who technically they’re better than I was on pointe.  When they put on their pointe shoes and dance a duet, they take on this “I have to be perfect” ballet mentality.  To free them from that and get them to be completely comfortable with who they are and show who they are rather than trying to conform to an idea of what ballet looks like, which was a big process.  It’s fascinating to me that it wouldn’t be completely natural to them.

How did you get them to not think that way?

A lot of rehearsal and talking about it from lots of different points of view to help them find it for themselves.  It needs a sense of irony and freedom that takes a lot of work to get to be so comfortable and confident and secure in their sense of being a woman.  It’s a complicated thing to demand of them.  It took quite a bit of work to have them break free from the mold and become completely themselves. 

When Vanity Fair dubbed you the “punk ballerina”, what was your initial reaction?  Was your career helped by the exposure or did you not want to be labeled? 

I think I liked the label.  To me it really captured that I was interested in the most fine articulate balletic side of dance, but also the raw, visceral and unpredictable side that comes from rock-and-roll culture.  I thought it summed up the spirit of my work in a great way.  Honestly, I think it caused a lot of jealousy. I wasn’t in the ballet world, I wasn’t in the modern world and I think it was disturbing to the traditional dance world.  But, of course, that’s who I was and who I think I still am.  I don’t really fit into these categories.  It’s some other different kind of thing.  I’m still this odd-ball person.  Of course, the publicity was fantastic.  If only Vanity Fair was doing more dance.  Dance has become more marginalized in mainstream America.  It’s just not part of mass culture.  We need that exposure.  I wish there was more of it.

Armitage Gone! Dance at the MCA Stage, 220 E. Chicago Ave.  April 26 – 28 at 7:30 p.m.  Tickets are $35.  Call 312.397.4010 or visit mcachicago.org.

 

Meeting at the Edge

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Natya & Mordine collide in "Pushed to the Edge". Photo by Ravi Ganapathy.

Last Saturday, East met West choreographically on the stage in Skokie.  Supported in part by the Audience Architects MetLife Stages for Dance Initiative, Indian Bharata Natyam dance company Natya Dance Theatre and modern staple Mordine & Co. Dance Theater shared an evening of dance at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts.  The two stylistically divergent companies have worked together before and the respect for the respective art forms was evident in the performance.  A note from directors Hema Rajagopalan and Shirley Mordine in the front of the program talked about the collaboration.  “The choreography is undertaken with the understanding that culture is written by, in and through the body, and that how we move is in many respects who we are.”

Two works from early collaborations  started the show.  Two Rivers (2007) presented two duets side by side: one gestural, precise and percussive – the other earthy, grounded and present with the two rivers theme representing “the image of two bodies of water moving separately”.  The couples dancing in linear patterns intersected and passed each other like streams and seemed to be using the aesthetically different styles to say the same thing.  Lovely.  Sahridaya, from 2008, was a short, sweet duet to Philip Glass music with one dancer representing each company.  The stark contrast of the dancers, choreography and styles made for a really interesting study in form.  Ushasi Naha’s thin frame and pristine, placed approach against Mary Kate Sickel’s muscular, rounded, organic movement.

The title work – Pushed to the Edge – featured live musicians (barefoot) on stage.  Wings out, the stage deconstructed as well as folding chairs a la Ohad Naharin’s Minus 16 and video panels on the back scrim added a contemporary feel to the 15-dancer, all-female, cross-company piece.   The groups with Natya in beige and Mordine in sage green (beautiful costumes for all pieces by the fabulous Jeff Hancock!) took turns center stage in a passive, progressive dance off joining together at the edge of choreographic similarities, but never fully crossing over to the other style.  It was wonderful to see so many talented dancers together in such a cohesive and unique work.