Another Dance Night in Cleveland

We saw an unbelievable dance company last night, once again thanks to DanceCleveland.


 photo by Uri Nevo from http://www.kcdc.co.il/en/photos/ifatall.html#galMenu

This was the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company  (KCDC) from, you guessed it, a kibbutz in Israel.

The dance was what I am dubbing a "long form" dance - a novella as opposed to the usual collection of short stories. It was an hour and a quarter long and was the entire program.

It is extraordinary how each dance company we see has their own lexicon of movements and their own personality. The variations in repertoire in today's modern dance world are infinite and an endless channel for creativity. This company was started by Holocaust Survivors and its legacy is continued by the child of survivors, Rami Be'er, who directs the company and plans every detail: sets, music, costumes, lighting. The result is a very cohesive whole.

The piece we saw "If At All" (אמבכלל) is described on their website as "A moving theatrical event in figurative and abstract circles, from the closed form to the open structure. Physical space in motion whose essence is a chain of events of diverse and ever-changing interpersonal relationships."

 I would describe it as "post-narrative" - there is a story-like feel but there is no clear story line - just emotion, action and power. The long form creates a hypnotic immersion experience that pulls the viewer into a lengthy descent into the world of the dancers. The dancers are technically amazing, full of power and fluidity— explosive action and lyrical retreat. Many relationships seem to unfold; circles, duets, solos, groups move to ever changing music. The piece transforms itself as it moves from dark to light, costumes and lighting and music changing throughout, yet part of a unified whole.
 

The video (which is excellent) gives a taste of the experience. Watching the video makes me want to go back and see it again—it is one of those pieces that would continue to work on repeated viewings.

In the Q and A afterward the director, and two of the dancers, spoke overtly of not over-determining the interpretation for the audience but keeping it open, so that the viewer brings their own interpretation to it.

DanceCleveland, as usual, adds their own additional fabulous features to the experience, like buttons and chocolate kisses on the tables afterward and little post-its on each program to fill out and to put up on the wall after the performance in which viewers list three take-aways or their general impression: survival, celebration, athleticism. There is also a twitter gallery in the balcony. The organization is a model for hybrid audience engagement!

Somehow KCDC created a story of survival, love and life through dance—and today it continues to echo within me.

Dance Cleveland: The Jessica Lang Company

For our very last concert in this season's Dance Cleveland subscription series we went to see the Jessica Lang Company. The previous concert we saw in our series (which I did not blog about) was the final season of a company that is closing after 44 years. In contrast, this was a brand new company which began performing in 2011.

And what a contrast! The energy and dynamism, innovation and technique of this new company had the audience out of their seats. The young artistic director brought in many streams of inspiration from other media: architecture, interior design, new compositions, textiles and video. I loved the interplay of so many mediums and the way they formed a powerful, coherent interstitial experience.

 Lines Cubed (photo from http://www.jessicalangdance.com)

 The first piece, Lines Cubed, was an amazing architectural piece divided into movements by color: black, red, yellow, blue. The background is a direct quote from Mondrian's color block painting, and the dancers interact with movable sets by molo; softblock modular paper accordioned installations which can create vertical and horizontal walls. The dancers interact with these installations with geometric and architectural precision, sometimes dancing in free space, sometimes around the installations. Each movement has a different color and completely different mood, with differently cut costumes colored according to the title of the movement. The pop electronica music by John Metcalfe and Thomas Metcalf perfectly blended with the clockwork like dancing of the dancers. The audience stood up in admiration at the end of the piece. I was there with Irad and Yuval, and we felt uplifted and inspired—the work was imaginative and wholly original. It was a cross-genre pollination with every element representing the highest form of that art's expression.

Mendelssohn/Incomplete (photo from http://www.jessicalangdance.com)

Next was a single movement from a Mendelssohn piano trio. The set was minimal, the dancers wore dusky blue and grape, and the over all effect was lyrical and soothing.

Among the Stars (photo from http://www.jessicalangdance.com)

And the third dance in the first half was an astoundingly beautiful and moving couple's dance with music by Ryuichi Sakamoto ("Snowy Village & The Girl"). The dance is constructed around a long sheet of silk which begins as a train for the woman's dress, and then drops to the floor to form a river, a bridge, a cloak...as it is integrated into a breathtakingly beautiful dance set to dreamy piano and violin music.

During the intermission we had the usual DANCECleveland fun of posting our post-its on the wall with our "take-aways" (Mondrian, architectural, clockwork), eating chocolate kisses and picking up new DanceCleveland buttons.

DANCECleveland makes a new button for each performance

The second half:

The Calling (photo from http://www.jessicalangdance.com)

Irad and I couldn't imagine how they could follow such a stellar first half at the same level, but they did it. The very first dance was stunning; a woman emerges out of an enormous white dress, bare backed with an ocean of skirt surrounding her, with her back to the audience, and performs the entire dance without moving from the spot, bending and swaying, at one point sinking into the dress as if she is sinking into the ground à la wicked witch "I'm melting" to the audible oohs of the entire audience. The musical setting  "o Maria, stella maris" performed by Trio Mediaeval, to a solo woman's a capella chanting, very straight tone and haunting. The dancer herself, Kana Kimura, a beautiful Japanese woman,  embodied the silent feminine grace of the dance perfectly. We realized she was the same dancer we had seen last year in the Metropolitan Opera production of Nixon and China.

This was followed by a video created by Lang with Shinchini Maruyama (the Japanese presence in the show—composer, videographer and dancer—was indirectly explained in the Q & A following the show when Lang mentioned that her husband is a Japanese dancer). It was set to Grieg piano music (4 movements from Lyric Pieces Op. 12, nos. 1, 4, were the ones we succeeded in picking out, since they weren't credited,)  and featured sequences of dancers shown at different film speeds, sometimes doubling themselves, yet perfectly coordinated to the music, and very playful. Though not as strong an experience as seeing the live dancers, we learned afterwards in the Q & A that this passive performance component was strategic in keeping the dancers fresh and allowing them time for costume changes, since there are only 9 dancers in the entire company and it is quite taxing on a small cast to sustain an evening's show.

i.n.k. (photo from http://www.jessicalangdance.com)

With the screen still up, the finale began—another collaboration with Maruyama, his video art KUSHO as backdrop, showing blobs of ink thrown up into the air. The dancers appear in inky black costumes and themselves perform different shapes and contortions, sometimes in relation to the backdrop of liquid ink shapes, and sometimes independently. All the while an original score by Jakub Ciupinski played, with lots of watery droplet sounds, making for a complete visual and auditory rorschach fest.

Excerpts from all the dances in the show are available on Lang's website. 

As usual there was a Q & A afterwards in which we learned some of the director's story of how she got there, the thrill of seeing her own name before the Dance Company, and how she finds her ideas, dancers and collaborations. I liked how she phrased catching the "wink of an idea" here or there, and how she lays her nets to catch her collaborators. (Which is basically how she described several of her collaborations, she doesn't seem to just ask people outright to collaborate.) All the dancers knew each other from Julliard or Twyla Tharp, and I was struck by her statement that she needed dancers who could take care of themselves and their bodies so she could stick to the business of being artistic director. (As if that is not always the case in a touring company.) We noticed that many of the dancers also have staff positions.

We are lucky to have a very perspicacious and talented curator in Pam Young, Executive Director of DANCECleveland. This company was such a great find, and to have caught on to them so early in their career takes a special knowledge of the dance world and a talent for the hunt. She always gives a light, joyful and short introduction to each performance and one can tell she loves her work and the world of dance. There are pieces to the program that we do not see, which is that each dance company does workshops and masterclasses with local students, as well as performing for us. 

My reflection as I left was that we are now getting to meet the new generation of great artists and thinkers who will influence the next 50 years of culture. Life will continue after we are gone with wonderful new talent and genius continuing to build and innovate on everything that has come before them and imagining a future that we are lucky enough to glimpse. As the poet Kahlil Gibran wrote about the next generation:

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

Yet we did indeed visit the house of tomorrow, and it was a dream!

DANCECleveland: Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet

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.

Local Tourism II

Local Tourism II: DANCECleveland Ballet X

And that was only Part I of our evening out on the town. After an hour in paper wonderland we got in the car and motored it to the E. J Thomas Performing Arts Hall, at Akron University, to see the first concert in our DanceCleveland subscription: Ballet X, a dance company out of Philadelphia that focuses on new and emerging choreographers. E.J. Thomas is a wonderful hall that evokes fond memories for us, specifically of last spring's recital from Thomas Hampson - but I digress, and could digress for hours about this wonderful recital.

3 Dances were performed - the first was called Still@Life choreographed by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and somehow refers to the process and work of Michelangelo to the lively strains of Bach. Though I didn't see the connection specifically to Michelangelo, it was definitely a celebration of form, structure, animation and color. To see wonderful dancers is to let some part of your middle-aged and limited body take flight along with them. Irad and I really felt inspired and uplifted and entranced during this entire first dance, and even Fat Rabbit, who came along to this part of the evening reluctantly, was transported.

The second dance, Silt, by Alex Ketley, was dark, jerky, depressing and full of a collage of caterwauling sounds. I know dance companies need to create balanced programs, but I didn't enjoy the work and it was a downer, though technically excellent.

And the finale, Glass, by their co-assistant artistic director, Matthew Neenan, was a wonderful, brawling tableau of beautiful images and moving vignettes set to the music of Indie band Beirut, who I will now look up. It left us excited and uplifted, and Fat Rabbit, too, despite herself loved it and was full of questions about the meaning of the dance.

excerpts from Glass 

I was struck by how well organized this series is, as was the Morgan Conservatory event. These are events created by mature cultural organizations that pay attention to every detail. The DanceCleveland event began with a few words from a student, who described to us briefly the week in residence that Akron U dance students had with the dancers. There was a pre-concert lecture and a post concert Q & A with the dancers, and abundant cookies and punch in the lobby on the way out, and Ballet X buttons to join the series of buttons commemorating the dance companies in residence, who always kick off the Dance Cleveland subscription. This is loving detail and perhaps the function of being a smaller city who prizes its arts events. I've never been given cookies at Lincoln Center!

Home in time to read a few more pages in Keith Richards "Life." Stay tuned for a review of this amazing book in my book review section.