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(10/01/15 2:44am)
One. Two. Three. Four. Motions repeated, counting up to 60, restarting, repeating, repeating.
How long will this continue?
When will it finally end?
These were the questions evoked by “reRace: a movement study,” the first piece of Barack adé Soleil’s keynote performance of this year’s Clifford Symposium “The ‘good’ Body.” In movement, adé Soleil and collaborating dancer Drew Coleman seemed to demand that audience members feel the frustration, confusion and indignation of watching a cycle repeat over and over again. During the post-performance discussion, Soleil tied these emotions to the cycles of racism, discrimination and violence that have continued to perpetuate themselves in our lives.
“If it seemed like it was getting redundant, well, guess what — our lives are becoming redundant,” Soleil said, challenging the audience to recognize the impact of our daily actions on the well-worn grooves of societal habit and unquestioning self-absorption.
Soleil’s performance served as an invitation to pause and reflect on how we might change our behavior. In the program notes, he expressed his desire to broaden the definitions and interpretations of a good body.
“As a queer disabled artist of color, [I am] committed to expressing the beauty of the intersectional body as an inherent reflection of humanity,” Soleil wrote.
The second piece, “turtle,” featured one particularly captivating moment of invitation. As Soleil stood hunched over in the center of the stage, members of the production crew, all clad in black, came to remove his crutches from his hands. Then, nine collaborators rose from their seats in the audience and walked onto the stage to help Soleil from standing position to the floor, before returning to their seats once more. In the post-performance conversation, Soleil described this moment as representative of others’ disregard of his individual will.
“People are always trying to help me. They don’t ask — I kid you not — they just touch,” he said.
In the piece “objects are objects,” the same nine audience participants came one by one onstage to observe “the object”: dancer Drew Coleman covered completely in “what appears to be ethnic cloth,” as special guest prompter and Assistant Professor of Dance Cristal Brown put it.
While each participant surveyed the human objects, Brown described the participants based on what they were wearing and then read the identifiers they had previously written down about themselves. As the participants observed, they themselves became objects observed by the audience. In this exchange, Soleil managed to open up a space for people to act and self-identify as they wished, all while highlighting the fact that the choice to self-identify is a privilege that not everyone has. The piece cultivated
Rachel Frank an awareness of the contrast between the assumptions, judgments and stereotypes we make about people based on visual categories of race, gender and ability (among other identifiers), and the inner sense of identity that cannot be recognized without mutual understanding and respect.
A later piece, entitled “objects are objects,” featured yet another collaboration between Soleil and Coleman. Both clad in black, they moved in unison on a blindingly bright white rectangle on the floor, with audible exhales evidencing their exertion. The glaring symbolism of what it means to be black in a white space was emphasized by moments in which either Coleman or Soleil would exit the white space for a moment to observe the other from the black space outside the illuminated white rectangle. During the final moments of the piece, however, Coleman and Soleil came together to move as one body, punctuated by moments of struggle and stiffness. Eventually, they exited the white rectangle to rest in the black space, bringing the piece to a hushed end.
The “message” behind a dance piece is never very simple. From the tactile smoothness of a hand gliding into a shirt sleeve to the tense stillness of a foot paused in mid-air, each movement in Barack Soleil’s performance could have evoked an interpretation, emotion or reaction distinct to the life experience of the individual audience member. To write about it, then, is to explore the perceptions of the writer’s experience not in an attempt to unpack the performance into discrete units of meaning, but rather to bring attention to any questions or observations that may arise. Dance performance cannot be experienced in a written review, nor can it be summarized objectively — this writing is only to participate in the dialogue incited by the performance as it reverberates in the lives of the experiencers.
(05/06/15 3:39pm)
Dance-making has deep roots, in the experiences of choreographer and dancer alike. For the four senior dance majors whose choreographic work composed “Threshold” this past weekend, their research in various fields deeply informed their pieces. For all of the works, the choreographers engaged in dance as a mode of research – Stevie Durocher ’15.5 in connection with English literature, Doug LeCours ’15 with creative writing, Afi Yellow-Duke ’15 with sociology and Sarae Snyder ’15 with physicality and anatomical study.
Pervasive through the evening was a constant questioning of what it means to be a body, a person, in relation to societal expectations. Perhaps the most narrative work of the evening was Stevie Durocher’s “Reasons,” performed by Krystal Egbuchalam ’18, Olivia Raggio ’15.5, Julia Rossen ’16, Esme Valette ’16 and Durocher herself. Durocher’s solo and duet work with Egbuchalam followed the opening of the piece, in which the audience saw only shadows of dancers on the illuminated surface of the white scrim at the back of the dance theater – effectively creating images of smooth, ballet-esque movement like shadows on the stage of Durocher’s memory as she performed an intensely reflective and inwardly-focused solo. She hesitantly put on a pair of pointe shoes and moved between uninhibited leaps and stillness on pointe, embodying the intersection between a classical ballet background and modern dance forms.
LeCours’ work, “MY SAD GIRL DEAD BOY PROM NIGHT PITY PARTY,” shed light on the American narratives of sad girls and mourning rituals alongside the dialogue of LeCours’ queer male body. The piece invited a space of “radical mourning” that challenged audience members to laugh, to cry and to grieve the traumas, large or small, that we have all experienced. His five dancers, Juliette Gobin ’16, Emily Luan ’15, Annie Powers ’15, Sarae Snyder ’15 and Meredith White ’15, formed a group of wraith-like women clad in white nightgowns. Their distant, sorrowful gazes lent their movement an almost involuntary or sleepwalk-like feel, interrupted only by moments in which Gobin, and later White, broke apart from the other women for solo moments, collapsing out of the automatic motion into a more pained expressiveness. White’s tangible agony accompanied the sound of her whimpers and sobs as she struggled between the distant, reflex motion and her emotional collapse, and heel-toed offstage.
Sarae Snyder’s duet work, “Vowels,” was brought to life by Miguel Castillo ’17.5 and Meredith White ’15, in an exploration of how physicality and interaction develop meaning throughout the creation and performance process.
“I am interested in how content emerges from otherwise ‘meaningless’ physicality,” Snyder wrote in the Program Notes.
While watching dance, it is often tempting to try to uncover a narrative behind the piece, but Snyder’s work defies this attempt by presenting varied and innovative movement forms that make the viewer’s experience very much their own. What we take with us after witnessing such a performance are glimpses of what the dance has provoked in us. This narrative was enhanced by portions of the audio: Compiled by Snyder, recordings of Castillo and White’s voices speaking words and non-words created sounds that defied meaning in the same way as their movements.
The ending phrase of “Vowels” invited this interpretation: For a moment, the pair held hands and leaned their upper bodies away from each other whilst placing their feet close together, united in gaze and breath. Before long, they gradually twisted and fell away to run to separate spotlights on either side of the stage, hands on their chests. This moment read as an expression of both a mutual need for connection and an acknowledgement of our need to stand on our own – simultaneously together and alone.
Choreographed by Afi Yellow-Duke ’15, “Post American Mess” engaged in a deep questioning of fear, the unknown and our confrontation of it – or rather, our lack thereof. The piece flickered into view with a stark light on dancers Rachel Getz ’15.5, Andrew Pester ’17 and Julia Rossen ’16 as they paced onstage, periodically raising their trembling hands beside their heads. Audio from various public safety announcement-like texts contributed to an atmosphere of worry and impending danger, amplified by evocations of run-duck-and-cover movements of bomb drills and jarringly contrasted by mocking, circus-like and patriotic music. Perhaps the piece’s most evocative movement was the morphing of an anxious hand twitch into a saluting hand – addressing the notion of how America, as a concept, a place and a society, can stand at the root of our anxieties.
The evening’s last work was a second duet, created and performed by Sarae Snyder and Maggie Ammons, a student of dance and neurobiology at Bennington College. The work’s title “(Co)incidents” is layered in its significance, as it reflects the collaborative process of creation, whilst also sounding very much like ‘coincidence’ – a possible reference to the manner in which meaning and content emerged.
Snyder and Ammons exemplified a level of synchronicity in their unison phrases that deeply satisfied the aesthetic instinct – a particularly impressive feat in moments of silent movement. A note of humor arose as deep, club-like rhythms accompanied Ammons’ and Snyder’s empty-gazed, slack-limbed movement. At one point, they disregard each other to the point of bumping into and dancing over each other’s bodies – an allusion to practices of embodiment within dark, loud and bass-pumping music environments. But this physicality is dance as well. Within this piece, as in the works of the other senior choreographers, artists engaged in an exploration of the threshold of physicality and human experience in relation to culture, art and meaning.
(03/11/15 2:38pm)
A few days before Sola was to be performed at the Middlebury College Dance Theatre this past weekend, I received an email from the box office stating that the Friday night show would be an abbreviated version of the full concert. I wondered what their apology was really for — and considered that if I had not been notified I might not have known that the concert was any different from what the dancers had intended it to be. I hadn’t yet formed an expectation of what I would be getting from the show, and so hearing that it would be different from the dancers’ intended performance was odd — because how was I to know what the intended performance was supposed to be, since it hadn’t happened yet?
When I attended on Friday night I was part of a small audience, and quite a few people had expressed to me their desire to see the full concert instead of an abbreviated version. While I understand that in creating a performance, there is an element of wholeness created through the rehearsal and choreographic process, Sola was an evening of solo works choreographed for and by women, and on Friday, two of the six dancers, Andee Scott and Bliss Kohlmyer, were unable to be in the show. I wondered if there was a sensation of disappointment rooted in not-getting-what-you-paid-for. And yet this is art — what does anyone intend to “get” out of it? My mind roamed from ideas of acquisition and consumerism to a simple feeling of fear of missing out on the fullest performance experience. Does this feeling come from a kind of personal efficiency — that we can’t possibly “waste” a moment on something incomplete or imperfect?
In exploring my perspective of dance since arriving at the College and studying the art form more seriously, I have come to the conclusion that for me, appreciating art is not about getting something out of it or understanding it. Rather, it is about the experience — how a performance or a work makes you feel, the thoughts or images that it inspires and the awareness that both the artist and the viewer are intimately involved in that interaction. But this kind of experience necessitates openness on the part of the viewer and a willingness to let oneself be taken in to access the raw interplay of perception and expression.
This interplay was particularly strong and verging on the uncomfortable with Amy Chavasse’s 2014 work from the University of Michigan, “Conspiracy Going,” as the flow of often nonsensical spoken text challenged one’s sense of what words signify, and how disorienting it can be when words do not go together in their expected patterns of usage. The text was adapted from an anonymous blog post commenting on a 2008 performance by Chavasse.
An intensely effective moment of this piece was when Chavasse repeated a single phrase with one movement corresponding to each word, beginning by stating each word slowly with the motion, and gradually speeding up to form one cohesive phrase of word and motion that took on meaning gradually as one came to see how they went together. It provoked the question of how we perceive language and meaning, asking whether words make any sense in distinctive units or if they only gain meaning in relation to other words and underlying contextualization.
Assistant Professor of Dance Tzveta Kassabova presented her 2009 work “Letter (to Ed),” a deeply emotive piece in which her virtuosic choreographic and performance ability left some audience members in tears. Her performance was punctuated with several moments in which her body was still, but her gaze to a space beyond the audience conjured the sensation of great distance, contrasting with powerful and reaching movements in the piece that felt as if they traversed such a distance. One of those moments was when Kassabova leapt up with her arms extended outwards and executed a mid-air contraction and outward kick that felt like a burst of energy from her center.
Pamela Pietro of the New York University Tisch School of the Arts performed her 2014 piece “You are That” and also utilized intentional gaze to seize the audience’s attention, which would not have been difficult in the first place because her stage presence demanded it. In one particularly striking moment, Pietro directly faced the audience, intently but expressionlessly staring out and repeatedly circling her hips. The audience experienced that repetitive sensation of when a motion or a word’s constructed significance or connotation begins to wear off — and we begin to question anew what it might mean.
“In Her Solitude: Lest We Forget” is a 2009 piece choreographed by Ursula Payne and performed by Mary Williford Shade of Texas Woman’s University, in which Shade interacted with a white rocking chair. For me this work gained a very strong symbolic arc when, after Shade’s movement conversation with the rocking chair as an object and a partner, she actually sat down on the chair for just a moment, only to rise again rapidly, provoking me to think that perhaps she realized that she could not occupy the same chair as whoever came before, and that she had to create and continue her own dance.
In the abstract art form of modern dance the viewer has the opportunity and the challenge to experience or interpret meaning to the movement as they will, if only they trust and take the risk of opening him or herself to that interaction with the performers.
(02/25/15 6:52pm)
What exactly do professors do when they teach? Are they communicating some aspect of their experience — sharing some of their knowledge or perspective with students? Or are they laying bare their personal investigative process and human experience for all to see? The dance department this week presents four faculty members engaging in the latter, showing their individual and collaborative artistic work in the Faculty Dance Concert this Thursday, Feb. 26, at 8 p.m. in the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts (MCA) Dance Theatre.
While students mainly engage with professors in the classroom setting, faculty are deeply immersed in their fields of study and continue to develop their research and work as they teach. This is especially so in the dance department, where professors interweave their teaching role into their lives as actively
creating artists.
“Particularly with professors in the arts, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that we also are artists and choreographers working with our own creative process — and we’re here also to share that knowledge with students. When it comes to making art, there’s no answer, no right or wrong way to do it. The faculty concert allows us to be part of that dialogue, to say we’re also researching these ideas and dealing with these difficult practices and questions,” Artist in Residence Scotty Hardwig said.
This performance will be the first faculty concert the department has held in over a decade, and will provide the new artists on the faculty this year the opportunity to share their personal creative research with the campus community. As the dance department makes the transition correlating with the retirement of two long-time faculty members, Andrea Olsen and Penny Campbell, the new faculty members’ artistic visions and interests are driving the direction of development for the dance program.
The concert also affords students the experience of working with professional dance artists — Meredith White ’16 will perform the premiere of “In Plain Sight” choreographed by Chair of the Dance Department Christal Brown, and Andrew Pester ’17 and Naomi Eisenberg ’18 will perform in Scotty Hardwig’s work created in collaboration with visual artist Kern Samuel. Assistant Professor of Dance Tzveta Kassabova will present her work “Little is left to tell,” performed by Emmakate Geisdorf, Joey Loto, and Lacey Moore, and Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Trebien Pollard will perform the excerpt “Shaking the Devil: the black swan effect” from his solo concert “Seeing the Unspeakable” which will premiere at Middlebury on April 2.
As students participate in and witness the creative processes of the faculty members they work with, the perspective arises that while we are students of our respective disciplines learning from professors with more experience in a field, we are also all curious human beings trying to understand our world through various lenses, disciplines and expressive practices. In this endeavor the line between the professor and the student — the teacher and the taught — blurs.
In the field of dance this is particularly evident because of the physical in-the-moment presence of performance.
“With dance, where the body is being made so public, there’s the vulnerability of displaying your craft so openly — there’s no barrier of language or scholarship or publication — it’s just you,” Hardwig said.
Professors Brown, Hardwig and Pollard will dance in the concert with all the vulnerability, honesty and openness of artistic performance.
One of the fundamental unifying qualities of dance as an expressive and investigative art form is the physical, bodily experience that we all share. Regardless of how we intellectually analyze or understand a dance piece, as audience members we physically experience the presence of other human beings expressing an aspect of their humanity, and that alone can deeply affect our perception of other people and their lives.
By presenting this performance, the dance department faculty members are inviting us into the physical expressive experience and into their lives as artists and educators in a way that is profoundly vulnerable, but also characteristic of art as a means of communicating experience and inviting connection.
“In the process of showing our creative research, we’re placing our bodies for public witness,” Hardwig said. “That’s really powerful and crosses boundaries in a really amazing way.”
(01/15/15 2:15am)
I look around me and so much of what I see is divided into separate categories like academic and extracurricular, useful and useless, justice and injustice, natural and artificial, rational and irrational, mind and body. These kinds of binaries can be useful as a way of understanding what is or is not, but I have found they often lead to a narrow view of our experience as something that can be subdivided and neatly delineated.
Take the example of physical education — for many of us, physical education classes are tacked onto our academic schedule or relegated to an extracurricular activity that we view as lesser importance than schoolwork. I often hear people talk about the relief that comes with engaging in physical activity, since so much of our time at the College is in the cerebral, academic realm, but this comment raises an important question. Isn’t every activity in some way physical? We experience the world through our bodies from necessity, walking from place to place, sitting in chairs, speaking and reading. At every moment we are taking in the world around us through our physical perception of sensory information in sight, smell, taste, touch and sound. And yet, conscious attention to our physicality is often limited to designated spaces. We set aside time here and there to go to the gym, for a walk or to a PE class, but otherwise I wonder if we don’t often walk around imagining that our bodies are just shells for our mental existences.
It struck me recently that many advancements in technology seem oriented towards mechanically replacing physical work. From the mechanization of industry to automobiles to electronic communication and commerce, it seems that the amount of physical engagement we have with our world is decreasing. So the question arises: Does movement matter?
The Dance Department is currently engaging in a project that answers with a resounding yes, and is aptly named Movement Matters. Supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Movement Matters is a multi-year project that intends to challenge separations and seek out collaboration and creative integration of movement and embodiment across disciplines and academic departments. Dance Department Chair Christal Brown expressed her enthusiasm for the project, which she will direct as it expands to engage the campus as a whole.
“Movement Matters is an exploration of how human bodies literally and metaphorically shape our physical and political worlds,” Brown said. “Regardless of academic discipline, dance and movement offer deep insight into how we think about ourselves, both individually and as part of the larger human community.”
By blending the boundaries that typically separate disciplines, Movement Matters is exemplifying the liberal arts at its best, constantly questioning and innovating what it means to learn and engage in education. Embodied scholarship is the epitome of the study of dance as an art form and an academic discipline, and this project aims to explore how embodiment and attention to the physical experience can enrich any field of study. Most fundamentally, it aims to grapple with the way we experience our bodies in relation to the world. What if physical education wasn’t treated separately, but instead integrated holistically into our educational experience, because body and mind are not separate?
The project has brought Kate Speer, Makeda Thomas and Maree ReMalia to campus for J-term, and the three dancers will work to create cross-disciplinary links and new avenues for connecting movement and academic scholarship. After this month of research and exploration, one of the artists will be selected for a two-year residency as Middlebury’s Mellon Interdisciplinary Choreographer, who will deepen the explorations they begin this month and develop connections and innovations of movement and embodiment across disciplines.
After public master classes this week, including one on Jan. 15 with Speer from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts (CFA) Dance Theatre, the artists will give a culminating presentation on their work during J-term on Jan. 26 at 10:30 a.m. in the CFA Dance Theatre. For more information about the project and the artists, visit go/movementmatters.
(11/20/14 12:38am)
On Saturday, Nov. 15 in Wilson Hall, the Middlebury International Students’ Organization (ISO) brought a splash of cultural celebration to campus with their annual cultural show, this year titled “Crossing Borders.”
Students often hear about Middlebury’s “international focus,” and the ISO show is one of the main occasions of celebration, education and collaboration about a variety of cultural perspectives and performance traditions. The ISO’s description of the event reveals their emphasis on cultural appreciation and sharing.
“Middlebury is home to a multitude of identities,” event organizers said. “Although each one is distinct and unique, we bridge diversity and our differences through a celebration of all cultures. With each form of expression, we share a piece of ourselves with others.”
The evening performance, presented to a full audience, gave international and domestic students the opportunity to share their own cultural traditions or to learn and participate in the presentation of traditions different from their own. Members of student cultural organizations including Capoeira, Japanese Club, Ingoma Afropella group, Korean American Student Association, Salsa Club and MiddMasti Southeast Asian Dance were represented in the evening’s 18-piece lineup.
Perhaps the most stirring performances of the evening for this dance appreciator were the large group dance pieces, which especially stood out because of the intercultural engagement and involvement. It was a pleasure to note that quite a few students were in multiple pieces, sharing in many different cultural expressions and showing the inclusive and intercultural communication form that dance can be.
During the traditional Japanese fishermen’s group dance, “Souran Bushi,” the performers moved rhythmically in an upbeat pace that evoked the seaside processing of a morning catch. One of the most striking visuals occurred when the rows of dancers moved in opposing directions like ocean waves.
The African Dance Medley, like many of the evening’s performances, made it difficult to sit still in one’s chair. The dancers performed three different dances, including the Gumboot dance of the mines of South Africa, the Azonto of Ghana and Lipala of the Kenyan Afro-pop band Sauti Sol. The Gumboot dance’s distinct stomping and clapping rhythms were impressively in sync and at times incredibly rapidly executed. As the music for Azonto and Lipala played, one couldn’t help but smile and move along with the beat, reveling in how joyously the dancers performed onstage.
The K-Pop Girls piece gave the audience a glimpse of the popular music trend, a genre of South Korean pop music characterized by large musical groups that often perform synchronized dances to their songs. The playful and energetic unison movements, along with the distinctive K-pop feminine fashion, made for an entertaining perspective on the K-pop culture that emphasizes group dance and garners impressively devoted fan bases in South Korea and the world.
Two selections of Latin dance livened up the evening with stunning partner dancing that left one wishing to join Middlebury’s Salsa Club to learn some of their moves. The flirtatious and fun movements and expressions of the dancers, as well as the characteristically dexterous hip movement, made for a performance that delighted the audience with selections of salsa, merengue and jazz to popular songs still played at Latin dance parties today.
MiddMasti’s performance of an Indian folk dance celebrating the Hindu goddess of female power, Durga, was visually dazzling. Swirling skirts in bright, festive colors captivated the eye as distinct visual shapes made with the arms formed a piece that literally sparkled.
With ten out of the eighteen performances presenting dance from Brazil to Pakistan, it was clear how dance is an important form of expression in many cultures, followed closely by music and poetry, from El Salvador to South Africa, which made up seven of the evening’s pieces. The 18th form of expression was the Fashion Show, featuring national costumes and styles from Ghana to India. Just outside Wilson Hall, photographs of students wearing their national styles bore descriptions of the various traditional garments and invited audience members to contemplate the multiplicity of ways diverse cultures express themselves through clothing.
The ISO cultural show is put on every fall, and this year was made possible through the effort and dedication of the ISO’s three presidents, Adara Wicaksono ’17, Gabbie Santos ’17 and Hiruy Ephrem ’17, as well as the many performers involved. The show exemplified the most positive aspects of intercultural exchange and appreciation, and it was inspiring to witness so many individuals joyfully sharing their distinct cultural identities with the College community.
Walking through the crowd of people just outside the Hall after the performance, one could see and feel the exuberant energy and smiles of performers and audience members alike, who were both enthusiastic about diversity and individuality and united in the delight of the shared experience. This event fostered an essentially important sense of positivity and hope, encouraging us to look around from time to time and acknowledge what an incredible group of people make up this community. Perhaps more importantly, it also allowed students to appreciate all the possibilities for understanding new perspectives and enjoying friendships during our time here at the College.
(11/12/14 9:38pm)
A space for art of all kinds, from spoken word to sculpture to radio pieces to dance, Flicker is the student-created-and- produced showcase for artistic expression, established and directed by Aoife Duna ’16.5. The first showcase of the year took place on Friday, Nov. 7 in the Middlebury College Dance Theatre, with ten works presented in addition to a pre-show tabling of literary publications from around campus.
This iteration of Flicker, the second after the premier J-term 2014 event, welcomed works-in-progress alongside finished pieces, allowing artists to share their creative processes with the campus community. This unique opportunity to create and share one’s personal artistic endeavors, class-related or not, aims to encourage exploration, experimentation and collaboration between people inclined to express themselves through a wide array of mediums.
In the College environment, we may not always find it possible to devote the time to creating polished, finalized works between other demands. This is part of the reason Duna encourages people to present ongoing pieces and to collaborate in the creative process.
Willingness to show a work in the midst of its creation holds an element of vulnerability and openness on the part of the artist which establishes the potential for engaging dialogue between peers and appreciators, friends and spectators. Hopefully, this will generate a greater enthusiasm for engaging with art in all its forms at the College and beyond.
The creative experience of this iteration of Flicker began before audience members even entered the theater, with tables set up for literary publications Room 404, Beyond the Green and Storytold to share their work. Inside the theater, audience members encountered a sculpture by Annie Bartholomew ’17 that engaged the eye with color and non-linear shape. Then the performances began, ranging from poetry to a radio piece to a myriad of dance performances.
Since I was part of a dance piece choreographed by Duna, I would like to take the opportunity to share a bit of the choreographic and rehearsal process behind her work, “Banana Split (with a side of brewing storm).” Many people have expressed to me that they “don’t understand dance,” so perhaps a glimpse into the way it takes form will open up some avenues of appreciation.
It is important, for me at least, to note that art-making does not always have a specific purpose or message that the viewer or audience member is supposed to “get.” Rather, it is about tapping into the deeper aspects of our human experience and learning to express those insights.
For her piece, Duna began with an intention to explore an energy and physicality other than the oft-assumed ideal of grace and effortless perfection of movement that stems from modern dance’s roots in ballet. To explore a kind of movement that is more raw, even animalistic, in its physicality, we began our first rehearsals listening to the kind of energetic music that just demands movement, letting the energy come out in whatever physical form felt right rather than jumping into refined, memorized choreography right away.
Exploring the interplay of sound, movement and energies formed a foundation of inquiry and ideas upon which the piece developed over several weeks of rehearsal. The work took form in sections or phrases that captured some ideas important to Duna as part of the vision of the whole piece, and the phrases gradually came together, shifting and settling into an overall structure as we learned the choreography.
Each choreographer, of course, has his or her personal way of developing a piece, but for me as a dancer it was rewarding to share in so much of Duna’s imagination of what the piece meant to her, and to help it take shape. Duna spoke in rehearsals about creating a space where we could feel free to express ourselves fully and physically in a way that we rarely are able to experience in our daily lives due to societal or personal expectations of how we should act or move. Whether that meant leaping around the room and yelling, flailing and laughing, rolling around on the floor or being still, it was about being fully embodied in how we felt and not holding anything in. This sense of freedom in our creative expression was channeled into Duna’s choreography. Even as we embodied movements that she had come up with, the movements were also our own, sustained and given life and meaning through our individual energy.
In the dynamic, creative interplay of Duna’s vision as a choreographer and the individual personalities and physical presences of every dancer, a space of collaboration and mutual exploration gave rise to a piece and a performance experience which hopefully shared some of that creative exploration of rich physical expression with the audience who attended Flicker on Friday night.
Flicker will have its next iteration in J-term of 2015. Interested students may become involved in making art of any and all kinds by visiting go/flicker and contacting Aoife Duna (aduna@middlebury.edu) for more information. The showcase welcomes any artists curious about making and exploring, no experience required. As Duna put it, “Keep making, doing, questioning, yearning! Lets kick Midd’s art scene into high gear!”
(10/22/14 10:54pm)
In the intimate setting of the Middlebury College Dance Theatre, artist-in-residence Scotty Hardwig and guest performer Keanu Forrest Brady, accompanied by media operator Michael Ryba, explored masculinity in the digital frame.
The six works presented, including two short film installations, came together the evening of Saturday, Oct. 18 from several years of works, but Hardwig said he saw common themes underlying them all.
“I realized that I’ve been making work about the same thing,” he said. “My work is always somehow about gender.”
The pieces flowed together as entrances and exits, and beginnings and endings all felt part of the performance, perhaps hinting at the performative nature of gender and masculinity.
As the audience filtered in before the show began, the seats in the darkened theater ringed the rectangle of gridded light. When Brady entered to lie down shrouded under the projection, it was as if he had entered a digital frame which he never left over the course of the piece. As the grid-patterned light began to move, the projection on Brady’s skin fooled the eye into believing that Brady’s body was moving, an illusion only broken by his actual movement a few moments later. As Brady was wearing only a revealing dance belt, the audience was able to fully experience the sensation of hearing his skin contacting the floor as he stretched and glided all around the projection frame, always close to the ground. At times swallowing Brady with blackness, the dimensionality of the projection evoked a feeling of dynamism between dancer and environment. The relationship between dancers and set can often be biased toward a focus on the dancers’ movement, but here the human motion was equally important to the projection’s motion. When Brady finally rose to his feet, the digital net-like lighting that he had been swimming through disappeared, and strobe lighting teased the eye with single-frame glimpses of fluid movement.
Hardwig continued this exploration of dancer and environment in Quiet Blossoms Sometimes Burning, an improvisational work-in-progress in Ryba’s manipulation of the light projection and Hardwig’s movement formed a digital duet. In contrast to Brady’s prominent and audible contact with the floor surface, Hardwig was light-footed and made little sound in his contact with the white marbley performance surface. The interactive quality of the piece was emphasized by the colorful sparks of the projection on the floor. At moments sparks flew on the floor as Hardwig sustained slower, fluid motion, creating the thrilling feeling that Hardwig was a still figure in a whirlwind of passing motion.
Dornwald, the first of two short film installations, changed the three-dimensional dancer and environment relationship into two dimensions as the film was projected onto the floor. Though it was difficult to see the whole picture from the angle of seating, Dornwald’s negative coloration and overlay of multiple video images gave an eerie and almost frightful mood to the room, enhanced by the sound of the Vienna Boy’s Choir recording of “Kyrie Eleison.”
When a human presence returned to the stage there was an air of near relief. A physical body is easier for this writer to relate to than two-dimensional negative colored images. Brady didn’t allow for much reassurance, however, in Of Dead Boys and Blind Men as his juxtaposition of seizure-like vibratory motion and sustained fluidity raised questions of perceived images of strength versus inner state. The choreography, a collaboration of Hardwig and Laquimah Vandunk’s, was dramatically embodied by the dexterity and mobile strength of Brady. An image that was met with audible appreciative reactions from the audience was a moment when Brady, kneeling and sitting on his heels, rose straight up to standing as if lifted from above, before continuing to flow within his frame.
In the second film installation, One Small Creature Crying in a Forest, dark colors framed a study of frenzied motion of the hands and feet, accompanied by the intimate sounds of breath and hands on skin.
The last piece brought Brady and Hardwig together on stage in coordinating slacks and button down shirts. After moving in unison at first, the duo created their most visually and physically spectacular moments of alternated lifts when Brady and Hardwig threw themselves at each other with full strength, only to be caught and have their energy transformed into a gentle revolving lift. These exchanges highlighted the central performance theme of male vulnerability in a world where it is often perceived as weakness, and therefore concealed.
In a brief discussion with the artists after vigorous applause, Hardwig spoke of his exploration of the masculine.
“Traditionally in dance, especially in ballet, the male dancer serves as a frame for the feminine,” he said. He expressed his aim to study masculinity in dance especially in a society that is often strongly opinionated about the image of male dancers, and queer male dancers in particular. Hardwig explained the approach to his creative process, which involves a complex, multidisciplinary incorporation of sound, videography, choreography and performance.
“It’s okay to get lost,” he laughed. “Some of the most meaningful discoveries come from that state of confusion.”
Hardwig said that he approaches a work with questions in mind to explore, but that art is not about finding concrete answers.
“I never feel like I’ve reached a conclusion at the end of a piece,” he said. “But therein lies the challenge and the delight of art making: it’s about exploration and discovery, but it never ends.”
(09/24/14 2:32pm)
On Sept. 18 at the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts Dance Theatre, artists brought together by connections to North Carolina and Vermont presented NC Dances VT, an evening of dance works by The Van Dyke Dance Group, the University of Vermont’s Coordinator of Dance Paul Besaw and Assistant Professor of Dance Christal Brown. The concert was composed of six works quite distinct in character, yet all the pieces incorporated some common heritage of the choreographers’ experiences in North Carolina and Vermont.
We tend to consider the sweat arising from physical exertion as undesirable or gross, but the human body is capable of so much dynamism and expression in movement achieved by intense physical effort. The evening of dance performances reminded us of those possibilities of beauty in physicality, beginning with the piece “Tract,” choreographed by Besaw and performed by Brown and Vermont area dancers Misha Bailey, Hanna Satterlee and Marly Spieser-Schneider.
The stage was centered by musician D. Thomas Toner, who stood playing the marimba in a spotlight as the female dancers, dressed in matching blue, swirled around him in circular motion for much of the piece. The live performance of the music within the dance raised the question of the interaction of music and dance in performance. We often focus on the visual of the dancers moving through space while taking for granted the strong emotional effect the music can have on us as viewers. At several points during the piece, the dancers slowed their movements to cause a visual shift towards Toner, who continued to move at his own pace with the music in center stage. At the close of the piece the four dancers strode off the stage at a run while intensely gazing at the audience, as if to question what we notice and where our focus lies.
“A Sense of Order,” choreographed by Jan Van Dyke, featured The Van Dyke Dance Group’s Laura McDuffee, Christine Bowen Stevens and Kelly Swindell depicting scenes of repetitive and ritualistic daily life, presumably of working women in costumes that evoked hotel maids. The motion of the three dancers was mechanical and strictly rhythmical, as if constrained and dictated by the clock — as is often the case in a busy working life. The three women formed various trio formations, each depending on and supporting the others, though at a few points rectangular blocks of light would illuminate the floor and cause the trio to break up momentarily. A striking moment near the end of the piece was when two of the dancers backed out of such a corridor of light and were dramatically obscured by darkness at the back of the theatre before reemerging to continue going through their motions as before, as if hinting at a possibility for escape from the stark black and white colors and rhythms of their routine.
The third piece, “Pastor of Souls,” was certainly the most visually unusual work of the evening. Besaw appeared onstage wearing sneakers, sweatpants, a scrub shirt, latex gloves and a blue surgical mask while holding a box of tissues under his arm. Moving deliberately and slowly in a disturbing green light, he conjured an air of eeriness as he began doling out tissues one by one from the box. The first one he drew out of the box agonizingly and spent much time floating and waving it about before letting it fall to the ground, but by the end of the piece, after offering the box to a front-row audience member, he frantically pulled tissue after tissue out of the box and threw them into the air. It seemed to connote a disposable and consumerist attitude about medical care that promises remedy after remedy to be used and disposed of at a whim.
The next piece, choreographed by Brown and performed by New York City dancer Beatrice Capote, was titled “Miss Universe,” and began with an accordingly stunning visual. In the pitch black theatre, Capote stood slowly revolving over a small globular projector that lit up the inside of her thin white hoop skirt with patterns of stars. But as the theatre filled with light and the music changed, Capote stepped out of the skirt and shifted swiftly from the delicate revolving motion to an energetic and lithe freedom of movement that was richly satisfying to watch. She vacillated several times between this fulfilling motion and contrasting measured and careful quality as she focused on the skirt or the black star globe. At one point, while dancing with the skirt on, the audience was left waiting for her to abandon the hindered motion the skirt allowed and to leap out into freedom again. This contrast suggested a struggle between the inner forces and passions we all possess, and the controlled, proper image that we desire to show the world, and this work certainly hinted at the depths of possibility within.
“The Life and Times” by Van Dyke was a stirring duet between Besaw and Swindell, who portrayed the progression of a relationship between a man and a woman. The piece was elegantly framed by parallel movements in the beginning and end. At first the couple stood in separate, distanced spotlights, sliding back and forth in sync to the music, but the piece closed with them sharing one spotlight, Besaw behind Swindell as she held up her left hand at a right angle to frame his face. Within the narrative of their interaction, their respective movement qualities revealed the personalities of their characters while also complementing each other in moments of embrace or contact. It seemed to be a story of mutual support and understanding that withstood the challenges of time and conflict.
The ending piece of the evening was “Interiors,” a work-in-progress by Brown. Opening with shy body language and the quiet sound of her singing, Brown evoked a young and unsure individual who gradually gained comfort with the stage and found her voice — a moment marked by a burst of confidence in her movement and a shift to orange lighting. Yet in the midst of this self-discovery she found loneliness and fear as sounds of whispers and voices flooded the theatre and Brown whispered, “Is anybody here?” over and over again. The audience discovered a cause of her distress as the audio clip played, “An unarmed teenager was shot and killed today,” and as she pointed two fingers in the shape of a gun towards the door. Her motion and the sound changed to qualities of defiance and strength as the words, “I’m gonna dance my God-damned dance” reverberated through the theatre, and the audience felt Brown’s power and the will to find her own truth amidst all of the voices and confusion of a seemingly unjust reality through her body and expressions.
NC Dances VT presented a wide variety of choreography and artistic expression, and it is clear that all had a strong message to convey to the audience, though what that message was may have been different to each person. Such is the nature of experiencing dance.
(09/18/14 1:08am)
The fall semester is a time of transition for Middlebury’s Dance Program, as three new faculty members begin to make their mark in the wake of the retirement of longtime Professor of Dance Penny Campbell and the imminent retirement of Professor of Dance Andrea Olsen, who is on sabbatical leave this year. Assisstant Professor of Dance Christal Brown envisions a revamping of the dance curriculum, which will aid students in becoming embodied scholars with critical lenses for the creative outlet of the medium.
Brown expressed the hope that the program’s image to the greater campus is one of clarity and accessibility.
“We want to make it clear that dance is just as rigorous an academic discipline as others,” she said. “It can be easy to dismiss a field of study one knows little about, especially those in the arts, as not as academically serious as, say, physics or economics, but each area of study holds it own challenges and rewards, and no one discipline is greater than another.”
As the dance program evolves, the three new faculty members will bring their varying perspectives and visions to Middlebury this year.
Tzveta Kassabova is joining the long-term faculty as an Assistant Professor of Dance. Originally from Bulgaria, she came to the United States in 1999 with the intention of studying meteorology at the University of Maryland.
“I knew my secret mission was to dance, and so I ran away to New York,” she said.
With her Masters in meteorology in hand, in New York City she danced with the David Dorfman Dance Company and in other choreographers’ works. After a few years, Kassabova returned to the University of Maryland to pursue her MFA in dance, expand her views on art and build a body of original dance works. She then began showing her own choreography in the Washington, D.C. area and teaching at the University of Maryland and George Washington University. Before coming to the College, Kassabova taught for two years as a full time guest artist at the University of Florida, where she was involved in shaping the dance program and curriculum, as she hopes to do at the College as part of the core dance faculty.
During the summer Kassabova attended a workshop led by Olsen, where she experienced firsthand the teaching of a professor who has been a guiding force in the dance program for so long.
“It was wonderful to get a sense of continuation ... of exchange,” Kassabova said.
This semester Kassabova is teaching Introduction to Dance and Advanced Beginning Dance, in which she strives to create a welcoming experience to students just beginning or continuing their journey with dance, and to encourage them to explore and expand their capabilities.
Trebien Pollard is the new Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance and the Artistic Director of Dance Company of Middlebury (DCM) this year. A gymnast in early life, Pollard was introduced to dance in high school, and after studying mathematics education at Florida A&M University, he moved to New York City to train at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center. He then joined the Martha Graham Ensemble and continued dance professionally for 12 years in various other companies, including Pascal Rioult Dance Theater, Erick Hawkins Dance Co., and the MET (Metropolitan Opera Ballet). In 2004 he received his MFA in Dance from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts and began teaching and choreographing for the University of Southern Mississippi, Adelphi University, Queens College and Goucher College before arriving at the College.
Pollard’s work as a choreographer often explores themes of identity and our perception of it. By integrating costumes, poetry and music with performance, his work challenges audiences to explore different ways of seeing. In directing DCM this year, he expressed his hope that students will be open to collaborative inquiry and discovery.
“When you come in with too many of your own ideas based on where you’ve come from, it doesn’t leave room for exploring, for experimenting,” he said.
Pollard is teaching Dance History in the fall, as well as an open ballet class.
In the Artist-in-Residence position this year is Scotty Hardwig. After growing up in the Appalachian Mountains of Southern Virginia, he double majored in English and Dance at the University of Virginia. Hardwig chose to be a professional dancer precisely because it was one of the hardest things he could have done, and because of the honesty of dance as a form of self-expression.
“Whenever I’m performing in my work or whenever I make a piece, I’m creating something that’s the most me that I could express, in the most full and intense way possible,” he said.
Hardwig’s work in choreography is deeply engaged with digital media, and he explores how technology can help us make connections rather than alienating us from ourselves and our environment. By creating dance works for film in natural locations, Hardwig is able to bring his audience, via the language of the body and the medium of the camera, to places and experiences not possible in the traditional setting of a dance theater. In his spring Movement and Media course, Hardwig hopes to share the myriad possibilities for integrating the potential for digital technology into the art form of dance while maintaining a strong focus on technique, particularly in contact improvisation.
This fall Hardwig is teaching Anatomy and Kinesiology and will be choreographing works for the Fall Dance Concert, the Faculty Concert and the DCM.
The fall, the Dance Program is overflowing with the fresh experience of these new faculty, who are all three excited to share their perspectives on the study of dance and to shape the development of dance at the College.
(05/07/14 3:21pm)
This past weekend four seniors shared their senior thesis dance works with the College community in their concert “Reconstructed Notions”. Dance majors Hai Do ’14, Rachel Nuñez ’14, Cameron McKinney ’14 and Jill Moshman ’14 choreographed and performed deeply personal explorations that gave physical expression to the inner struggles, joys, discoveries and memories of the choreographers’ lives.
This writer views dance as one of the most foundational of art forms, all of which are ways of taking a part of the human experience and expressing it in physical form. In “Reconstructed Notions,” the audience was afforded a glimpse into the world as experienced through the lenses of four different individuals, embodied by the dancers in each piece. Such is the power of art — to transform that which exists in the mind into a form that the rest of the world can perceive. How each person interprets such artistic expressions, however, is entirely personal.
Many people on campus say that they don’t know enough about dance to understand it. But perhaps this disconnect stems from an expectation that dance — or art in general — must have some clear, stated meaning. Perhaps in a world where we are conditioned to search for definitions, evidence and certainty that we can depend on, art in its expression of the complexity and unpredictability of human experience is difficult to reconcile with our habitual world view.
Yet something still draws us back to art — to the energy of our favorite music, be it Beyoncé or Bach, to the pleasure of an image captured in pixels or paint, to the consuming power of dance at a party or the CFA Dance Theatre. Art often appeals to a level of our humanity that our rational minds have difficulty explaining, and maybe it is not necessary to “understand” dance, but instead to let yourself feel it — to let it take your imagination and emotions where it will and enjoy the places it allows you to experience.
Do took the audience into an exploration of his personal interpretation of hell in The Under/The Over? An awareness of the Buddhist teaching that all actions have consequences pervaded Do’s haunting imagery of repentance and self-torture. The five dwellers of Do’s hell, Honami Iizuka ’15, Liilia Namsing ’16, Cynthia Park ’16, Yuexin Zeng ’16 and Laura Xiao ’17 embodied Do’s imagined hell as he stayed to one side of the stage in meditative movement for much of the piece, observing the scene his dancers created.
A movement motif the dancers returned to time and again was a sudden contraction of the core with their hands seeming to pull away from their chests and abdomens, evoking blame and repentance. Do’s choreographer’s note describes this feeling.
“They constantly ask for forgiveness. They forget to forgive themselves,” he wrote.
The fluid and stretchy white fabric which the dancers moved with at certain moments created eerie shapes and outlines of struggling bodies trapped by illusory boundaries. Do’s work lay bare the dark emotions, fears and sufferings that are often hidden away in shame, inviting the viewer to look inward and face what may dwell there.
Nuñez delved into the swirling complexity of her identity as a woman and a dancer, with all the pressures, expectations and struggles that those labels can bring. The honesty and revealing nature of the recorded text mixed with music lent an intimacy to the tone of the piece, accentuated by the intensity and strength of Nuñez’s movement and gaze. With dancers Danielle Weindling ’17 and Xiao, This Is Not An Exit. defied the idea of what should be in favor of what is. Nuñez made clear what the piece meant to her.
“This Is Not An Exit. is about choosing movement over apology, and not being sorry for it,” the program said.
Other Lonely Seekers, choreographed by McKinney, blended his study of the Japanese dance Butoh into his own creative strength. Butoh, at its origin a way for the artists of Japan to examine their culture’s identity in relation to the events of World War II, probes the themes of light and darkness and the beauty that can be found in shadow. Dancers Brenna Roets ’17 and Najwa Stanford ’16 embodied darkness and light, respectively, in their black and white costumes and movement qualities. At several moments in the piece light and darkness look each other in the eye before continuing to dance with and around the other, joined by the fiery and colorful forces of dancers Anna Baratta ’15 and Elise Cabral ’16.
Images of agony in the faces of the dancers and moments of bodies on the ground formed alongside a melancholy section of the piece in which McKinney, along on stage, flowed to the slower sound of “Japanese Farewell Song” by Sam Cooke. Finding the interplay of dark agonized emotion and lighter energy, McKinney ended the piece by dragging the still-posed form of Roets out of the light and fading into darkness.
Exploring the ambiguity and fluidity of how we recollect our past in Nothing is Brand New, Moshman, collaborating in choreography and performance with Doug LeCours ’15, created an atmosphere punctuated with spoken text and humor. Moshman and LeCours, accompanied by live musician Taylor Bickford ’14, traversed a scene reflecting the haphazard and seemingly order-less way our minds retain memories: often in incomplete moments, images or shards of the past. A moment that stays in the mind of this writer was when Moshman verbally questioned how to decide on what to do next, followed by the physical response of Moshman and LeCours leaning into each other’s weight before continuing to dance.
The use of of dozens of small yellow rubber duckies on stage brought humor into the piece, though what they evoke for the audience is surely different from the evocation for Moshman and LeCours. The pair, both dancing with a fluidity and freedom channeled into precision, engaged in an exchange of feeling and movement striking to witness in a duet.
These four artists with their dancers ventured into explorations of the cultures, perceptions and experiences that have shaped them in their lives to create these thesis works, the culmination of their dance experience at Middlebury. Each of them formed these pieces by looking inward to examine their own stories, and then sharing aspects of those stories with us through dance.
(03/12/14 3:48pm)
What is art, and what defines art as worthy to be in a museum? These are the crucial questions Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Catherine Cabeen will raise in her gallery lecture-performance “Embodied Experience: Creating/Witnessing/Dancing” this Friday, March 14 at 12:15 p.m. in the Middlebury College Museum of Art.
Cabeen will present this talk/performance as part of the Museum of Art’s “Off the Wall: Informal Discussions about Art” series of lectures and conversations about our relationship to art in the museum. In an attempt to broaden the view of museum collections as more than just fixed pieces of art on the wall, the series highlights the interactions of artist, medium and audience in the conception, creation and presentation of the artistic process.
While the series consists mostly of lectures about the art in the College’s museum, Cabeen was inspired by the current exhibit “Performance Now,” curated by RoseLee Goldberg, which bravely explores the crossings of performance and visual art. In deciding how to share her connection to the art of “Performance Now,” one thing was clear for Cabeen.
“I wanted to make my point through performance art,” Cabeen said.
After her Carol Rifelj faculty lecture in January on “Dancing with Nouveau Realism,” in which she spoke live and showed videos of herself dancing, Cabeen decided to flip that standard format for this presentation. She will play a video of her talk while presenting her physical expression of performance art live.
“It’s more along the lines of kinetic sculpture … of using my live body as an example, uncontainable in the fact that I am three-dimensional,” Cabeen said.
By presenting a live performance in a museum space, Cabeen will dare the audience to confront the norm of cold anonymity that often characterizes art museums. The art is on the wall and the viewer is outside, able to choose whether to observe carefully and engage with the art or to simply take a glance and walk on. In this often silent and passive relationship between art and viewer, it is easy to forget that art is about communication.
“Art is something that humans make to talk about some aspect of their understanding of what it means to be human,” Cabeen said.
By displaying art in museums, curators have to make decisions about what qualifies as art and what is worthy of display. In doing so, however, performance art is usually left out because of practical concerns of the ephemerality of the art form. Through her performance, Cabeen intends to embody the questions of why performance art is often left out of museums and why it is difficult and hard to understand. In framing her body as art, she will encourage the audience to acknowledge the accountability of live performance.
“I’m interested in how uncomfortable it is to look at someone when they’re looking back,” Cabeen said.
While this doesn’t necessarily mean Cabeen will be staring down unwitting audience members, it does mean that she wants the audience to consider the ease with which we can gaze at a static piece of art, in contrast to the discomfort of being confronted with real, live intimacy.
This uneasiness with intimacy has greater cultural implications than just eye contact; as Skype conversations, phone calls and texting normalize digital, non-physical interaction, our culture seems to be literally losing touch—losing awareness of the importance of physical presence and communication.
By juxtaposing herself against a familiar video of herself giving a lecture, Cabeen will be physically present as a dynamic expression of art.
“Fear of live bodies is translating more and more in our culture into a fear of intimacy and relating in a live way,” Cabeen said.
In confronting this fear Cabeen challenges the way our society places value on art—a process largely colored by commodification in our consumerism-based culture. Since performance art is difficult to contain and commodify, it is all too easily left out of the category of so-considered museum-quality art.
But if we remind ourselves that art is an expression of human experience, then what does categorizing and valuating art mean to how we view our human experience?
Cabeen will explore how this valuating perspective translates into our culture in her presentation. Light lunch will be served, and the event is free to college ID holders.
(02/26/14 4:46pm)
This weekend at the Middlebury College Dance Theatre, masks were worn, washed off and fashioned as the Dance Company of Middlebury, under the direction of Assistant Professor of Dance Christal Brown, performed “The Meaning of the Masks.”
The performance began unravelling cultural “masks” of convention before viewers even settled into the theatre. House lights remained lit and ushers pointed people to seats as the audience gradually became aware of the nearly immobile forms of the dancers who had appeared onstage. With eyes closed and faces painted various shades of white, grey or green, the seven members of the Dance Company of Middlebury — Hai Do ’14, Amy Donahue ’13.5, Cameron McKinney ’14, Jill Moshman ’14, Rachel Nuñez ’14, Isabella Tudisco-Sadacca ’13.5 and Chelsea Chuyou Wang ’16 — glided around the stage, each step slowly dragged forward.
The audience, conflicted between the cultural expectation that they should be silently attentive of performers onstage and the confusion that the show was not supposed to start for another few minutes, settled into an uncomfortable silence as the last few audience members shuffled into the remaining seats of the dance theatre. This initial upset of what is understood culturally as the beginning of a performance raised the question for the evening: What is cultural convention, and how do we mask ourselves to conform to or break from such convention?
Under this frame of mind the first piece, “Fly Catching,” choreographed by visiting artist Shizu Homma, could be interpreted as an escape from the confines of conventional working life. The dancers, sporting painted faces, closed eyes and office attire, moved as puppets directed lethargically forward until the strings began to be cut. Dancer by dancer, body part by body part, the imagined lines went slack, and the dancers slumped a shoulder, a hip or a torso. Occasionally, the lines tightened again and the dancers righted themselves, until finally the strings were severed and dancers fell to the ground. The remaining few strings unsuccessfully attempted to revive them, but eventually all dancers collapsed. Once all the strings were cut, all seven dancers rose and began to laugh hysterically as they skipped around the stage — in this writer’s interpretation, freed from their puppet existences.
This puppet segment created a lasting image of all the dancers standing in a line facing the audience after righting themselves from various slack movements. McKinney stood as an exception, raising his head last. As the only movement onstage, the audience was invited to focus on that incrementally slow motion, somehow making the movement incredibly personal.
Once free of their puppet strings, the dancers presented a fascinating contrast between primate rituals of grooming and their human parallels. Moving as primates, the dancers pounded the ground and picked imagined insects off of each other’s backs; in the human parallel dancers offered each other fruit and fixed each other’s make-up and clothing.
“Are rituals, games and structured society really culture, or more complicated systems of animal instincts and hierarchies?” Homma asked in her choreographer’s note.
The second piece, “Paperdoll,” choreographed by Ayo Janeen Jackson, smoothly transitioned from the first, but began distinctly with a bathing ritual. Wang got into a metal tub and cleansed herself of her paint mask as McKinney and Do brought out water and poured it over her. She chose a red sheet of butcher paper out of several red dresses that the female dancers presented to her. Performed by Moshman and Nuñez for the Saturday matinee and evening performances, respectively, on Friday evening Donahue lay down on the paper to perform the solo, clad only in nude underwear.
The piece clearly became one of bursting through a self-created mask as Donahue traced her body onto the paper and fashioned herself a dress out of it with scissors and duct tape — notably, with a tail. Her fiercely determined movements were lent a defiant and powerful feeling by Madonna’s “Give it 2 Me” pounding through the theatre, with empowering lyrics such as ‘Nobody’s gonna stop me now’ emphasizing Donahue’s actions.
As the song shifted to “Hurricane” by Grace Jones, Donahue embodied the force of a hurricane with stunningly executed spins in the air reminiscent of a figure skater’s jumps. The leaps and repeated falls seemed to become more painful as Donahue kept on, until at the close of the song she wrapped her paper tail around her neck — and it snapped.
She ran from the stage as McKinney entered wearing ragged, dark strips of cloth and exploring a movement that felt richly primitive in its honesty. The rest of the dancers soon joined McKinney onstage for the beginning of “Collecting Carnival,” choreographed by Brown as “a movement menagerie of the African Diaspora,” according to the program.
As the seven members of the Dance Company of Middlebury moved together onstage, the connection between this group of artist-creator-performer-dancers felt vibrant and richly satisfying to witness.
The dancers gradually pieced together their personal masks as the work progressed, each donning intricate individual costumes of feathers, black paint and colors and a particular movement quality that they chose in order to expose a part of themselves. In what Donahue called in the program “experiential performance practice,” the dancers explored how their chosen masks allowed them to delve into experiencing a part of themselves not otherwise obvious or exposed — and raised the question for the audience to wonder about their own masks as well.
Near the conclusion of the Carnival piece, all the dancers moved in sync in a stationary running motion with their arms pumping but their feet firmly planted on the ground.
“It is the human race and an individual race,” Brown said, referencing our own masks of cultural conformity.
As students, we have much to gain from reflection on the topics explored through dance in “The Meaning of the Masks.” We all wear many masks to conform and blend in with the flow of our culture as students and as members of our various individual cultures, and those masks are not necessarily a negative part of our interactions. However, to understand what lies beneath those masks and what influences their formation, perhaps we should take the time to explore ourselves behind the masks.
(02/12/14 9:38pm)
As the lights went dark in the Middlebury College Dance Theatre on Jan. 30, the audience waited with anticipation to see Flicker light up the space with new works by student dancers, choreographers, poets and artists. A culmination of a J-term project directed by Aoife Duna ’16.5 and Octavio Hingle-Webster ’17, Flicker showcased twelve student pieces ranging from film to spoken word to dance.
For Duna, Flicker began as a dance showcase.
“The production started out with the goal of creating a supportive place for new dancers to explore and create their work,” Duna said.
Though the event was initially intended to highlight only one art form, Flicker rapidly expanded to include various artistic disciplines. During J-term students got together each week to share their progress and critique each other.
“The weekly meetings allowed artists to dig deeper into [their] creative visions,” Duna said.
The evening began with “Artski,” a short cinematographic exploration created by Adeline Cleveland ’13.5 and Sarah Briggs ’14. Stop motion photography allowed the audience to see color swirling onto Cleveland’s and Brigg’s chests and faces as the two danced through landscapes. The film also forayed into the artistic possibilities of skiing as Cleveland and Briggs filmed themselves trailing red fabric and balloons behind them down a ski slope.
Following the short film, Lorena Neira ’17 performed her solo piece, “Hay un Niño en la Calle,” meaning “There is a child in the street.” In her tender portrayal of the vulnerability of a lonely child without a home, Neira clung to a symbol of comfort in the form of a shirt she picked up from the floor and bore on her shoulders. Throughout the performance, Neira probed the emotional possibilities of strength and child-like joy in the face of hardship.
In keeping with Flicker’s goal of providing an outlet for a wide range of artistic endeavors, Victoria Sheffield ’15’s spoken word performance followed Neira’s piece. With a confidently amused expression on her face, Sheffield walked onto the stage in silence, rolling up her shirt as she leaned forward and executed an undulating belly roll. Thus began her tale of confidence and pursuing one’s desires despite setbacks, which brought smiles to the audience.
“The Ways We Gaze,” choreographed and performed by Hingle-Webster and dancers Dave Yedid ’16 and Vladmir Kremenovic ’17, was set to a dance party beat that gave the piece the energy of a night out. The intensity of movement and the dark make-up flourishing the expressions of the dancers matched that energy, as the lyrics of “Sweat (On The Walls)” by John Tejada raised the questions, “What do you think about at night?” and “What is it that brings you here?” The most striking image halfway through the piece was a fierce gaze of the dancers into the audience, each reaching straight ahead with one hand and placing the fingers of the other hand artfully around one eye, as if demanding that the audience respond to the questions.
Celeste Allen’s “All These Bitches Crawl” was a dance and spoken word exploration of the artist’s sexuality and her struggle over time to navigate that part of her identity in a society that pressures and influences the choices one makes about sexual self-expression. The interaction with sexuality was brought into physical form with the use of a chair, which Allen sat on, stood on, overturned and eventually carried with her at the conclusion of the piece. The performance alternated between dance portions in which Allen embodied a sexual character to the sound of well-known songs with sexual themes, and spoken portions when Allen would interact with the chair as a representation of her sexual identity outside of herself. This contrast between a physical self with the music and an emotional self in silence raised the question of who we become when we allow the often degrading messages of popular music to cover our own voices.
“Sunday Roast,” a dance piece about a dysfunctional family dinner, was reminiscent of images of Thanksgiving gatherings gone terribly wrong. Choreographed by Molly Rose-Williams ’14 and performed by Cleveland, Duna, Emily Goins ’17, Neira and Molly Stuart ’15.5, the piece began with an uncomfortable scene around a dinner table with one chair missing, forcing each disgruntled member of the family to squat at different moments during the piece. The situation quickly deteriorated into an animalistic scene of chaos in a well-crafted blend of dance and theater in which the smallest member of the unfortunate family is placed on the table and mock-carved like the very meat the family had been eating before. This less-than-subtle allusion highlighted the ridiculous nature of the victimization of one’s own family members when dinner interactions go awry.
At the only moment in the evening when two pieces directly intermingled, the dinner scene’s dramatic climax was interrupted by the sound of a doorbell, which placed the family back in their seats as two guitarists entered the stage and were greeted by the family. The dancers of “Sunday Roast” soon cleared the stage and left Matt Spitzer ’17 and Auberin to their piece, “Parody of Two Guys Playing Guitar.” The pair performed two lighthearted songs, joking between the pieces that they didn’t know why the audience was laughing.
Breaking from the playful tone of Spitzer and Strickland’s performance, Kremenovic’s “Proshlost” presented a more dramatic tone enhanced by the shadowy blue stage lighting. Kremenovic performed a morning routine, going through the motions of a shower and venturing out into the day with arching leaps and dramatic falls before returning to the beginning of the routine and starting over several times, each more desperate than the last. Eventually Kremenovic broke from the routine and stripped to a a pair of nude briefs, giving the illusion of utterly bare motion. Nearly naked before the audience, Kremenovic’s movement felt free and honestly expressive without the routine motion the clothes symbolically tied him to.
“Night Terrors,” choreographed by Duna, kept the intense tone alive as dancers Goins, Neira, Anna Ready-Campbell ‘14, Veronica Rodriguez ’17.5, Sheffield, Megan Vargas ’17 and Rose-Williams performed a dance of dreams and nightmares. Through the intricate and beautifully executed choreography, the dancers’ depiction of fear triggered a kind of frozen observance from the audience that was unnervingly close to the experience of real nightmares.
Alan Sutton ’15 brought the audience back to reality with his spoken word performance of “Kinky Voices,” in which he brought out a desk and painted his nails while recounting a piece that simultaneously played behind him in video form.
Cameron McKinney ’14 began “This-Worldiness,” which he and visiting faculty member Tiffany Rhynard choreographed, with the shocking initial visual of walking onstage slowly dragging a skeleton attached to his ankle. McKinney’s motion throughout the piece was characteristically precise and intentional, but the most stunning moment in the piece was McKinney’s embodiment of primate-like movement.
The evening of varied artistic endeavors closed with “Opus One,” artistically influenced by Laura Strom ’15 and performed by Middlebury’s tap group On Tap. The joyful tap piece contrasted brightly with the modern dance styles of the other dance pieces and ended Flicker on a high note.
Duna and Hingle-Webster plan to put on future Flicker productions each month of the spring semester.
“We hope to continue creating this space for student-created art and community on campus,” Duna said.
All interested individuals can contact Aoife Duna (aduna@middlebury.edu) or Octavio Hingle-Webster (ohinglewebster@middlebury.edu) for information on those productions.
(01/23/14 3:43am)
This weekend at the Hepburn Zoo, a group of five students will present “Gruesome Playground Injuries,” a two-character play written by Rajiv Joseph. The story follows the relationship of Kayleen and Doug, played by Alia Khalil ’14.5 and Ben Kramer ’13.5, from the ages of eight to thirty-eight as they experience various injuries throughout their lives.
The play is performed in a series of chronological vignettes, each presenting a new injury one of the characters has sustained and providing snapshots of the relationship.
“The physical injuries are metaphors for emotional injuries,” Khalil said. “I hope that the show will provoke thoughts on timing and why people come into our lives at a certain time.”
Growing up and the resulting maturation of relationships also permeates the work. The audience observes as the characters share brief encounters and bond over their painful injuries at irregular intervals of up to ten years without seeing each other. Their comparison of physical scars becomes an exploration of emotional self-portraits of their lives.
“Gruesome Playground Injuries,” penned by contemporary American playwright Rajiv Joseph in 2009, presents an unusual type of theater, composed of only two characters who remain on stage the entire duration of the 70 minute play. The staging allows the audience to witness the actors shifting their age, costume and props during scene transitions. Participants face a unique challenge to portray believable shifts in their characters with little transition time and without the opportunity to momentarily leave the stage to occupy a slightly different character. The actors must explore the idea of how people change over time as they live through new experiences, while also retaining a core sense of self—a concept not unfamiliar to Middlebury students.
“Gruesome Playground Injuries” is possible due to the dedication of the five involved students, including actors Kramer and Khalil, director and set designer Teddy Anderson ’13.5 and lighting designers Nick Hemerling ’14.5 and Mari Vial-Golden ’14. After Khalil chose the show this past October, the group began rehearsing throughout the fall before J-term, which allowed them to devote more time to preparing the show for production.
“I chose the show because of the intriguing roles of Kayleen and Doug, and the challenge of playing roles whose greatness stems from their difficulty for the actor,” Khalil said. “I constantly question the role and how to portray it successfully onstage.”
The students presenting “Gruesome Playground Injuries” have worked hard on their own time outside of their sizeable Middlebury workloads, and are proud to present their efforts to the college audience. Khalil is excited to connect with an audience of peers and share with her friends what the group has been working on.
“It’s not performing a play to an audience of strangers in the Hepburn Zoo,” Khalil said.
The students will present “Gruesome Playground Injuries” this Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8pm each night. Tickets are $4. Come support your fellow students and enjoy the result of their hard work and dedication!