Our second show in this year's DanceCleveland subscription had my husband Irad, his business partner Yuval, and me chipping our way out of our home glacier and sliding and skidding between snowdrifts to the Ohio Theater downtown.
It was well worth the effort. Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet has a unique situation amongst contemporary dance companies: Generously funded by Walmart heiress Nancy Laurie, the company owns its own studio building in Manhattan, is able to pay its dancers 52 weeks a year (unheard of in the dance world), and bring in resident choreographers to develop pieces with the dancers for 5-9 weeks at a time, often including the input of individual dancers into the final project.
The experience of coming in from a weekend of huddling in hibernation at home to the high energy urban excitment of Cedar Lake was really to leave one world and enter another. The first dance, Indigo Rose, introduced us to the elegant athleticism of the company. Four different selections of music, ranging from avant garde to Couperin, amazing costumes, high tech lighting, shadow dancing with a billowing scrim, multi media projections. And the dancers! So young and vital, multi-ethnic and acrobatic—like watching pan-global acrobats. I felt like I had come to the Blade Runner of Dance Companies.
The second dance, 10 Duets on the Theme of Rescue, as usual for the middle act, was slower, and intensely emotional. Couple after couple enacting scenes of intimacy and drama.
And the third dance was a masterpiece of acrobaticism and group movement, like watching a huge sea amoeba composed of beautiful bodies. It is intense, humorous, anxious and passionate and is thematically based on New York City.
I have come to love DANCECleveland and every time I go my appreciation deepens. I went home and read their history, which goes back to 1954 and is quite remarkable. Apparently, appearing in the DANCECleveland series is an important stop for a contemporary dance company. In addition to being one of the only stand-alone dance presenters in the country, they add many creative features to each presentation: workshops and classes by each company with local students the days before a performance, a 45 minute talk before each performance, Q and A afterwards, and little post-it notes on each program to be filled out by the audience with their impressions and takeaways. The post-its go up on a board during intermission and one can see what other people experience. The act of reflecting on what was just seen deepens my relationship to it and sets my impressions and recollections —I may borrow this trick for presenting sessions in my own organization.
We stayed for the Q and A and had a fascinating glimpse into the process of the company and some of their vocabulary: flexible spines, athleticism, heads as a fifth appendage...They also mentioned that they have a nice blog of their travels that I did look at when I got home. Additionally we lingered afterward and had a wonderful conversation with Pam Young, their executive director, who does an amazing job of curating this series. We all agreed that this is a golden age of contemporary dance and we are lucky enough to have 5-7 cream of the crop companies brought to our doorstep every year.
Feeling energized and inspired, we went a few blocks down Euclid to Noodlecat where we sat at counters in the pub area and feasted on saki and sapporo and okonomi yaki, and steamed buns and noodles, laying in enough blubber to get us through the next few days of the cold snap, and thanks to DANCECleveland, feeling connected to a world of artistic excellence, technological innovation and ever evolving new aesthetics, to which with the help of all that Saki, we left all fired up to see what next we can experience, and even create ourselves. A good night out in Arctic Cleveberg.
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