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Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange

While looking at a previous newsletter of the Howard Hughes Medical Center, we came across an article on Liz Lerman's dance, Ferocious Beauty: Genome. Still being performed today and having its Canadian debut, we went to Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange, only to find that much of her company's choreography centers on contemporary issues.

Ferocious Beauty: Genome - Genetic research raises prospects that previous generations may scarcely have imagined: of prolonging life and maintaining youth indefinitely, of replicating an individual, of choosing the bodies and brains of our children, and of creating new species to feed and serve us. How we heal, age, procreate, and eat may all be altered in the next years by scientific research happening right now. 

Funny Uncles - While the number of blended families, adoption, single parents by choice and gay parenting are all on the rise, the image of family remains as a traditional, nuclear unit. Funny Uncles, conceived and directed by Producing Artistic Director Peter DiMuro, explores the reality of contemporary families through movement, theatre, video and spoken word.  

The Mining Project - Under the artistic direction of choreographer Martha Wittman Imprints on a Landscape: The Mining Project uses a combination of movement, video, spoken word, audio of interviews and traditional and original music to explore the connections between life, labor and landscape in coal mining communities.

"Imprints on a Landscape travels a double path,” explains Wittman, "exploring both the labor of mining and the labor of art. Each transforms something ordinary into something new. Mining turns rock into energy, and dance allows motion to become a story.”

Vignettes focus on the union movement, memories of working deep in the mines, family celebrations, and the banshee, a spirit whose presence evokes the reality of living with the constant, unquestioned threat of tragedy and death.

A Dancer's Journal

Click on the handle of Jordy Kandinsky's locker and you're at the entry of A Dancer's Journal; Learning to Perform the Dances of Martha Graham.

Jordy's assignment when she joined the company was to learn three ballets and understudy four roles in a period of six weeks: the woman in Lamentation, Ariadne in Errand Into the Maze, one of the followers in Appalachian Spring and the girl in yellow in Diversion of Angels.

There are a number of quite marvelous audio and video clips for viewing. One of the clips shows Ms. Graham performing Lamentation herself.

The artistic director prepares a check list to help Jordy learn the dances (as well as watching films of performances). Here are some of the points covered:

• Read what Graham and others have written about the dance
• Talk to those who have performed the role
• Find pictures, poems or other items that help you 'become' this character
• Fill the physical moves with meaning (give them character
• Learn to manipulate the props, sets, and costumes
• Learn how to wear your hair and apply the makeup for your character
• Rehearse to put everything together; hone your personal interpretation

British Dance Edition

On with the dance, let joy be unconfined;
No sleep to morn when Youth and Pleasure Meet
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet

— Lord Byron

The British Dance Edition is a biannual event held this past February in Leeds and organized by the Association of National Dance Agencies (ANDA) project "which enables dance companies to showcase their latest work and allows promoters to see this work compacted into a few days all in one city."

Some of the performances created by their choreographers were:

"Park is a place of refuge. Floating like an island in the urban ocean, Park is the backyard for worn out beliefs and redundant ideologies. In this playground, Jasmin Vardimon and her eight dancers create a new hybrid of metaphors and tales, a collage made from these remnants. Park becomes the place where the individual escapes the everyday in order to play."

Muttnik was choreographed by by Niki McCretton: Muttnik is a stray dog (patterned after Laika, the dog sent into space aboard the Russian Sputnik 2 rocket in 1957). "She lives on the streets of Moscow, cold and hungry until one day she is captured. To her surprise she finds herself in a new home with food, water and adventures better than dreams. She is living at the Russian Space Centre and is to become the first dog in space! She learns to fly a rocket, to dance in zero gravity and to go ‘where no dog has gone before. Will she skate on the rings of Saturn, what will be her first message home and what will it be like to dig holes on the moon?"

The Angika Dance Company is a "leading British Indian dance company and their work is committed to regenerating the rich vocabulary of classical Bharata Natyam dance with a contemporary approach." Bhakti (the work performed at the Dance Edition) means devotion and this new work is powered by the concentrated vitality and sculptural geometry of Angika's dance.

And, of course, there is that piece Chase the Glowing Hours with Flying Feet by Choreographer Helene Blackburn for Diversions, the Dance Company of Wales. Here's how they describe it:

"A witty and dynamic work accompanied by an evocative soundscape with Bach piano music. The dancers explore communication through sharp, ensemble movement and intimate dialogue, addressing their personal motivation to dance.:

Dance, People, Dance

An Australian site, DancePeopleDance, among other explorations, traces the history of early touring Australian dance companies.

In the 1920s the legendary dancer Anna Pavlova took Australia by storm; she was one of the first international stars to include Australia on her extensive touring circuit. Following in the footsteps of Pavlova, and building upon her successes, the Ballets Russes (Russian Ballet) companies of Colonel Wassily de Basil made three tours to Australia between 1936 and 1940.

The section titled Search for Identity examines the problem of Australians trying to balance " a European cultural heritage with a geographical location in the Southern Hemisphere":

Many influential figures in the world of Australian dance, including Robert Helpmann, Gertrud Bodenwieser and Edouard Borovansky, found different solutions to this dilemma of balancing location and heritage.

The Australian Vision segment explores the Aboriginal aspect of dance:

Until recently Aboriginal people were, almost without exception, the only audiences for Aboriginal dance. That situation has been transformed. Traditional dances are now being toured and choreographers of Aboriginal descent are making theatrical works based on their Indigenous heritage for showing in Australia and overseas.

Multicultural and social dance forms have always been popular participatory, and sometimes competitive, forms of dance in Australia and continue to be so into the twenty first century. Indigenous dance has also become one the diverse strands of popular Australian culture.

The costumes of Vanessa Leyonhjelm (and other designers) are worth noting here: "By using industrial materials— air conditioning insulation mesh, vacuum-formed synthetic material, nylon, raffia — in her costumes for Stanton Welch’s Divergence, Melbourne-based designer Vanessa Leyonhjelm moves classical dance costumes and accessories in a new direction."

Photographs, audio input and additional resources, make this a marvelous site from the National Library of Australia.

Another Century Anniversary

Frederick Ashton, like George Balanchine, was born in 1904. This date represents yet another century birthday fest for a great in the field of ballet choreography. Not as well known as Ballanchine but considered one of the greats of the 20th century, if not England's greatest.

The story of Ashton's version of La Fille Mal Gardee uses the plot device of the heroine, Lise, whose mother disapproves of her boyfriend and wants her to marry a rich man. The celebrated Margot Fonteyn performed in Ashton's version of Horoscope, predicated on a story line surrounding the influence of the signs of the zodiac on two young lovers. Fonteyn also appeared in Ashton's Sleeping Beauty.

Some of the ballets that Ashton danced in, as well as doing the choreography for, were Façade, Firebird, as the evil Kostchei, and in Cinderella as one of the ugly sisters. Among other ballets he designed, Ashton's choreography is on display in Gertrude Stein's opera, Four Saints in Three Acts.

Tutu Review carries a comprehensive article on Ashton by Clive Barnes that quotes Ashton as saying:

"Choreography is my whole being,
my whole life, my reason for living.
I pour into it all my love,
my frustrations.
To me, in many ways,
it has more reality
than the life which I live."

To celebrate Ashton's birth, Manhattan's Lincoln Center is presenting films for which Ashton choreographed dance sequences, The Tales of Hoffmann and The Tales of Beatrix Potter.

PBS' Dance in America series has a site dedicated to The Dream which premiered in 1964. Score by Felix Mendelssohn with choreography by Ashton, The Dream interprets Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. An essay on the site by Laura Jacobs further explores Ashton's background and talent. Jacobs comments:

Ashton, the son of a moody English businessman living in Lima, Peru, grew up in a city that tangoed. Ballet wasn't a reality but a tremulous vision, an epiphany in the form of Anna Pavlova, who toured through Lima when Ashton was 13. "She injected me with her poison and from the end of that evening I wanted to dance."

A screen saver from The Dream is a bonus to the site as is the excerpt from the pas de deux, accessible through a RealPlayer program.

100th Birthday

From the Bolshoi in Moscow to Beijing to Bellingham WA, the world is making note of George Balanchine's 100th birthday celebration. An article from the Australian Ballet's site, quotes Balanchine:

"A choreographer cannot invent rhythms, he can only reflect them in movement ... the organising of rhythm on a large scale is a sustained process, the function of a musical mind."

The five programmes that he Australian ballet is presenting this season explores the relationship between composer and choreographer. In this case, the site continues in its introduction to Stravinsky's Agon ballet, first performed in Los Angeles in 1957:

" Blanchine mirrored the twelve sections of the score in his use of twelve dancers, whose precision he likened to a "machine that thinks". As to what that machine may have been thinking about, Lincoln Kirstein, who commissioned Agon for the New York City Ballet, thought that the ballet's 'naked strength, bare authority and self-discipline' was a metaphor for the tension and anxiety of the era. If that is the case, one wonders what a collaboration between Stravinsky and Balanchine on the theme of contest would yield today."

The Balanchine Foundation highlights the beginning events in the centennial year. PBS is reprising the two-part American Masters program on Balanchine, Originally filmed in 1984, shortly after his death, Balanchine documents his career and celebrates the themes of his ballets.

Straying away from Balanchine a bit, we pursued the first chapter of No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century by Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick, who stated that:

"Though Isadora Duncan is usually given progenitorial precedence in inspiring the breakthrough to the modern era, Loie Fuller's fame preceded hers by a decade, and Fuller's niche beside Duncan is secure. Loie was not even a dancer by training (she had taken some six lessons in her life). Rather, she was an actress who specialized in male roles; nevertheless, she is considered the earliest major precursor of modern dance. Loie appeared onstage with bare feet; sometimes she wore draperies and sometimes flowing dresses, and she always went uncorseted."...

"With time her effects became more and more elaborate: the "fiery lighting" of her 1895 Salome was adapted to turn sea into blood for another rendition of Salome in 1907; in the Fire Dance (1895), which she performed on a glass plate lit from below (her own invention), "shaking and twisting in a torrent of incandescent lava, her long dress spouting flame and rolling around in burning spirals, ... she stood in blazing embers, and did not burn." To heighten her effects, Loie used no scenery, and she draped the stage, including the floor, in black velvet, so that the theater was in total darkness before her dances began. The complete absence of light was one of her earliest and most dramatic inventions."

Highlighted Sightings

The art of baroque music and dance: Bimbetta, Il Teatro Amoroso, early music in America, the vielle, the rebec and Bones 'n Drones.

The dance world was not very well represented on the Internet at first. Perhaps this is because, with the exception of the very large companies, most dance groups are underfunded. The fans of dance, though, are legion and a number of them have dedicated sites to their favorite form of artistic expression. We meant this sighting to cover many forms of dance and, instead, it became one only directed to the baroque.

A Toronto Opera site gives an overview of baroque dancing. While you may be aware of that form by name, you've probably heard of the minuet or the quadrille, perhaps seeing them performed in movies. There's a girl baroque band called Bimbetta, who has presented programs based on the "popular dances and repeating bass lines that swept Italy and Spain in the first years of the seventeenth century."

The group, composed of a cellist, harpsichordist and three sopranos, performs the music on composers composers Luigi Rossi, Claudio Monteverdi, Giovanni Felice Sances, and Juan Hidalgo wrote vocal and instrumental music on the chacona, passacaglia, folia, romanesca, and jacara, the most exciting and provocative of these exuberant dances.

The Kennedy Center has hosted workshops over the years on the minuet danced by The New York Baroque Dance Company. The company specializes in historical dance from the time of Handel, Haydn, Gluck, Monteverdi, and others. The company is led by Catherine Turocy and Oberlin College describes the dance in these terms:

Delicate, graceful, controlled yet deeply emotional, at once mannered and sensual, baroque dance is characterized by ornamental hand gestures, a relaxed foot, a 90-degree turnout of the legs, vertical carriage of the body, close interplay between music and movement, and the choreographic employment of symmetrical, complex floor patterns.

In New Bern, NC, the Baroque Dance Arts Project organized by Paige Whitley-Bauguess, specializes in this art. Whitley-Bauguess also is the leader of the Craven Historical Dancers and leads a dance workshop at Rutgers U in July. And on the other side of the globe, the Swiss company, Il Teatro Amoroso, combines the elements of dance and music with a basic formation of five singers, instrumentalists and dancers.

One site that lists festivals and workshops on 'early music' (and yes, baroque falls into that category) is ..... duh, the Early Music website.

If you're interested in a treatise on dance, consult the ever-wonderful Library of Congress. For historic dance instruction manuals, the Library again is your source. And, if you want to stump your friends with a new word, try Orchesography:

"or, the art of dancing by characters and demonstrative figures. Wherein the whole art is explain'd; with compleat tables of all steps us'd in dancing, and rules for the motions of the arms &c. Whereby any person (who understands dancing) may of himself learn all manner of dances."

The Early Music Guild of Seattle hosts a group using little-recognized stringed instruments of the Middle Ages: the vielle and the rebec.

Apparently, as Les Pages de la danse Baroque de Mercure Galante reveals, a 'schism' has developed between French and English styles of the dance:

Although modern baroque dance masters and scholars have the original contemporary notations to work from, a schism of interpretation has developed between the "French" and "English" styles. The French style interprets the steps as having a light, balletic flow, whereas the English style is very grounded and statuesque. French and English styles also differ about placement of the arms, for which there is scant notation to fall back on.

©1999-2008 Tam Martinides Gray for SeniorWomen Web