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Friday, Mar 29, 2024

Dancers Excite with Improvised Style

On May 3 and 4 an ensemble of dancers and musicians presented “Music, Dance, Light: Performance Improvisation” at the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts Dance Theater.  The performance was the capstone experience for a group of students enrolled in Senior Lecturer in Dance Penny Campbell’s improvisational dance course and also served as an exploration — as the title suggests — of the interplay between dance, music and light.


The student dance ensemble included Adeline Cleveland ’13.5, Hai Do ’14, Amy Donahue ’13.5, Douglas LeCours ’15, Jessica Lee ’13, Julianna Mauriello ’13, Cameron McKinney ’14, Rachel Nunez ’14, Sarae Snyder ’15 and Meredith White ’15, most of whom study dance as a major or minor.


Audience members were greeted by the sights and sounds of the performers warming up, exploring their ideas for the night and getting their bodies moving.  Dancers stretched and investigated specific movements, speeds and energies, while musicians played with varying intervals and colors of sound.  The six musicians, Arthur Brooks, Michael Chorney, Deborah Felmeth, Ron Rost, Anthony Santor and Heimo Wallner, played a total of 10 instruments, adding a jazzy, yet elegant live edge to the group.  The location of the musicians on stage, performer’s outfits and the interaction between sunset and stage lighting were the only premeditated parts of the evening.


The nature of the performance allowed any length and combination of pieces, as well as interesting juxtapositions of music and movement.  Audience members waited in curious anticipation of the structure of time and space and each performer’s unique decisions.


Campbell said of the improvisational style employed by the ensemble, “One of our fundamental understandings is that improvisation is composition.  From the first moment that someone begins to create sound, movement or light, form begins to emerge and all artists and members of the ensemble collaborate to mid-wife those first hints of life into a fully-fledged, unique piece.”


At the Saturday performance, the ensemble presented a variety of short pieces, each distinct in its ideas, movements and sounds.  Each piece began with a loosely pre-conceived notion and quickly evolved into whatever the performer’s wanted it to be.  Certain dancers or musicians emerged as soloists, and performers deftly communicated with each other, silently reading body cues and listening for musical patterns.


“As a member of this ensemble,” dancer Do said, “it is my responsibility to open up my awareness, process the information and make decisions that will contribute to the ensemble’s works.”


Original ideas expanded into bolder movements and relationships, bringing dancers together to collaborate with high levels of trust.  If a dancer started on a particular idea, one of the musicians may have chosen to provide that performer with a complimentary beat, but only for a period of time.  The work focused on the idea of evolution, asking performers to challenge their own boundaries and create new artistic relationships as an ensemble.


As the performance progressed, the audience viewed the sunset through the westward windows of the dance theater, adding a dimension of natural light progression to the presentation.  In the end, the three main components blended beautifully, offering surprising and thought-provoking, on-the-spot interpretations.  Each performer calmly made split-second decisions without showing a sign of thought, making the improvisational style seem effortless.


Students spoke enthusiastically about the comparisons between improvisational dance and life.


“In our practice of this form,” Sarae Snyder ’15 said, “we must face the unexpected, think physically and compositionally in a single instant and learn to let it go.  It is research and it can never be complete or fully mastered.  The process is the product.”


Rachel Nunez ’14 also found valuable real life connections in the work, saying, “This spirit of exploration, experimentation, questioning — which I first applied to my interpretation of the music, then later to my relationship to the other individuals in the ensemble, the space and my movement style and finally to the social norms and aesthetic standards of being a body dancing on a stage — is something that I recognize as valuable and vital, not only to the pursuit of art, but to the pursuit of life.”


The passionate, unique expression of creativity impressed the audience, who talked excitedly about the performance as they left the theater.   The evening presented an excellent change for students and community members who do not usually have the opportunity to experience improvisational dance and music and gave students a challenging opportunity to take their study of dance to a new level.


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