Spotlight on...Hannah and Kate

Author: Sarah Jameson

Dance majors Kate Elias '06 and Hannah Giles '06 talk to The Middlebury Campus in anticipation of their collaborative senior project. The performance of original chereography goes up this weekend in the Center for the Arts Dance Theatre.

The Campus: What were your main artistic goals in creating this concert? What ideas or emotions do you want to express?
Kate Elias: My main artistic goals are to challenge myself to really strip away the layers of thought around an idea and find the "kernel of truth" - always asking questions about choices and getting to the bottom of my reasons for making them. In this way, I see whether the movement material I've come up with needs to be manipulated and made more expressive of a certain idea, or if it is justified in its original form.
This concert is built on a foundation of collaboration, so expressing the dynamics of relationships is a central theme. My friendship with Hannah, my relationship with my dad [see below], the shifting rapports we have with ourselves - I am very interested in exploring how those everyday relationships manifest themselves on-stage, and how performing them changes them, reinforces them, provides a deeper understanding of them.

TC: How long have you two been dancing together? How does having such a strong relationship affect your performance?
KE: Hannah and I have been dancing together pretty much non-stop since freshman year when we met in our first-year seminar - our first dance class at Middlebury. We've only been in a few pieces together, however, and this concert has given us a great opportunity to work with each other very closely, understand more about each other's processes and deepen our friendship.
Hannah Giles: It's funny because dancing with people requires and creates a very intense intimacy that does not require knowledge of the dancers outside of the studio. Kate and I met because of dance, but our friendship definitely holds water outside the world of dance as well, and that translates back into our easeful working relationship in the studio. I think we understand each other pretty well most of the time and are quite familiar with the each other's bodies and movement styles, so it was a really nice, smooth process to put together the duet collaboratively.
KE: It comes with its challenges, though. I think any two people would experience some tension in their relationship when they spend so many long days together trying to solve problems. Recently, we were in Boston for the American College Dance Festival performing a duet that we choreographed together. We'd been on tour together just a couple weeks before, so we had been in close quarters for a long time, and I was cranky. I think our dancing always reflects how we're feeling about each other - when we're off in our friendship, we're off-balance and rough in our dancing, but when we're thinking and dealing well with each other, we're much more in tune with each other onstage. So before we went onstage in Boston I said, "Okay Han, this is only going to go well if we love each other very much." Sometimes we need to just say it out loud, and things are fine.

TC: How would you describe the style of the piece? Are you each bringing something different into the show or do you mainly stick to the same tastes?
KE: There are six pieces on the program - two solos, two group pieces and two duets. Each of them definitely has its own distinct style, although there is a common thread of Hannah and I wanting US - our personalities and relationships - to come through in a tangible way. This isn't about masking who we are behind a film of dancing. It's about revealing who we are as real people through dancing. Hopefully the concert is more accessible because of that. Hopefully even people who don't know us will get a sense of what we're about.
Hannah and I have very different styles of dancing - I tend to be more awkward and spastic, Han is incredibly graceful and so open. I know that both of us have been trying to break these movement habits for a long time, and I see it very clearly especially in our solos. It's almost like we're trying to dance more like each other, in a way. She's trying to inject more of the awkward into her movement, and I'm trying to be more expansive and elegant.
HG: There is a definite aesthetic that we both have assimilated during the course of our dance education here at Middlebury, but we also came in with different trainings, very different bodies,and different styles of movement. One of the things we try to do as choreographers is push ourselves out of our comfort zones, so that we don't end up always doing that one move that we really love, but instead take it a step further, ask more questions and thwart ourselves in a certain way. When Kate and I work together, we can trade phrases of movement and automatically are doing something we wouldn't come up with ourselves, which is often more interesting.

TC: I've read that the program also features contributions from family and friends. How have they contributed to the piece?
KE: This is one of the most exciting things for me about the concert. My dad, Gerald Elias, composed the music for my solo, called "V'adoro", and he is going to be here to perform it live. The piece is based on "V'adoro, pupille," a very beautiful Handel aria from the opera Julius Caesar. We've been working collaboratively over the past year or so, sending CDs and videotapes and lots of emails back and forth, to get it all put together. My dad is a great musician and a great composer, so it's quite a legacy that I've stepped into.
HG: We each have made pieces on groups of other people, both quintets, which we don't dance in. The dancers in those pieces are our friends - some were friends of ours before dancing with us, and others we have gotten to know through these dances. It's been great, and they're really game for anything, have been so generous with their time and energy and have worked incredibly hard over the last three months.
The people who are part of the dance program, our professors, the technical director and her staff, are all amazing people we've worked with for four years - definitely also friends. We're really lucky in our support network, and a bunch of people are working to make this concert come to life.
KE: Also, Peter Schmitz, a beloved former faculty member, came back to Middlebury to set an old duet of his on us. In 1986, Peter made "Your First Fall" with Matt Brown, who was a student at the time. Peter brought up the old video, and we learned the feeling and structure of the piece. Some of our new version is excerpted exactly from the 1986 original, but Peter gave us the assignment of inventing our own movement to insert into the existing structure. It was a really interesting learning experience to reconcile these two forms of the piece. The biggest challenge was trying to become Peter and Matt - we spent a lot of time channeling our inner scrappy young men.

TC: What factors, experiences or people have influenced this piece, or your dancing in general?
KE: Oh, everything, everyone. As cheesy as it sounds, graduation has played a major part in this process. I've been thinking a lot about transitions, boundaries, broadening frontiers and other themes such as mild insanity that graduation brings up. I think several of the pieces speak to that. My family has definitely been a strong influence, especially my dad, for this particular concert. They are all deeply artistic, creative people in music, visual art and education, so I'm always on my toes trying to live up to their high standards of artistry. That's good. Amy Chavasse, Penny Campbell, Andrea Olsen and Jenn Ponder in the dance department have taught us most of what we know about how to dance, how to make dances, and how to see dances so they have been major players in the process.

TC: Has this been a satisfying way to cap off your artistic experience at Middlebury? Do you plan to continue dance afte
r you graduate?
KE: It's incredibly satisfying to be able to share this show with Hannah, a person who has shaped so much of my college experience. In a lot of ways I wish I had more time to work, to go deeper with the choreography and tie up more loose ends. On the other hand, there is really never an end to this process, so I'm trying to convince myself that this is just a pause in the whole story, not an ending point.