"Niñoz" y Niños

The Middlebury Dance Company swept down to the Dominican Republic at the end of January to teach, perform and collaborate with professional dancers and children alike in the city of Puerto Plata.

The 2009-10 company — consisting of Elizabeth Boles ’10, Philippe Bronchtein ’10, Sarah Chapin ’12, Jeremy Cline ’11, Sophia Levine ’10, Catherine Miller ’11, Christian Morel ’11 and Alexandra Vasquez ’12 — traveled with Director of the Middlebury Dance Department Penny Campbell, musicians Arthur Brooks and Michael Chorney, business manager and program coordinator Nicole Patterson, and children’s dance consultant and MCFA staffer Shannon Bohler-Small.

Campbell established connections with Dominican partner Grupo Balsamo, a theater troupe dedicated to preserving and transmitting children’s games, during her sabbatical in 2008. Arisleyda Beard, the director of Group Balsamo, just established a new organization called The Meeting Place.

Housed in a colonial building, this cultural center strives to increase interaction between the self-contained expatriates who have moved to the Dominican Republic, resort dwellers and the people of Puerto Plata. The students arrived Tuesday, Jan. 26, the day after the cultural center opened.

The Middlebury Dance Company led workshops at these facilities.

As Levine explained, “We taught classes daily to dancers who perform professionally at resorts and groups that take part in dance competitions and Carneval. Often what we had to show them was different than what they had been exposed to. At the end of our lessons, they taught us and showed their work. At our second exchange, we learned the basic steps of merenge, bachata and salsa.”

The company performed two pieces at the outdoor Ivan Garcia stage, also a part of The Meeting Place.

They first showed “Proyecto República Dominicana,” a suite of three dances featuring Levine and Morel, followed up by “KIDZ/NINOZ,” an improvisational piece.

“Audiences were receptive,” noted Levine. “They called our way of dancing ‘classical,’ which was funny because in the U.S. we are considered anything but. I think people enjoyed the improvisation.”

Campbell agreed. “People were blown away by the company’s level of professionalism,” she said.

Middlebury students also visited two elementary schools and worked with fourth and fifth graders through the Vermont Institute on the Caribbean’s program “Healthy Neighborhoods, Healthy Kids.”

At the schools, they collaborated with the kids to create dances out of things in the neighborhood that the kids loved or wanted to change.

“The kids were really fun to work with,” Levine elaborated, “and each of the groups was very interesting. The group that Jeremy and I worked with made a dance about cleaning their beaches.”

“We strung these dances together for our final performance in the town’s central park,” said Campbell. “All the kids from the workshops were a part of it and others came too — there must have been 100 kids.

We added those who hadn’t been in the workshop to different groups from the elementary schools and the kids taught them the dances that they had created.”

In addition to the kid’s piece, Grupo Balsamo and the Middlebury Dance Company enacted several children’s games.

“The stage was three feet high,” said Campbell.

“There was a mosh pit of kids below, and the dancers would come down and engage the kids so that they participated in the games. The kids didn’t necessarily know all the older games they played, but you could see the old women singing along.”

Afterwards, the company ended the performance with KIDZ/NINOZ.

“This was great,” Campbell explained, “because the music for the piece featured recordings of Grupo Balsamo and when the kids heard it they recognized the songs that they had just been singing.”

“So many people showed up, and the energy with which they surrounded us was truly magical,” said Levine. The event was such a hit that both the governor of the province and a congressman attended.

The tour was a great success, but due to financial reasons, it seems unlikely that Middlebury will be able to host another trip of such magnitude; however, Campbell wants to continue the exchange.

“We have to keep this going,” she said as she proposed internship ideas for Middlebury students and alums.

If interested in learning more about tour, the dance company will be giving a public debriefing with video footage Thursday, Feb.18.