ADF 2011 "wrap-up"

Hm. So, clearly, I didn’t finish my ADF reviews because the end of the summer swept me off my feet, leaving no time to even think of composing a blog post. So this will sum up the rest of the shows I missed writing about. I started writing out a full Eiko & Koma piece but I’ll just do a light sum-up of the other shows so this post isn’t 5 years long.

Eiko & Koma - River (1995) in the Sarah P. Duke Gardens pond:

Yes, they performed in a pond. I was there for some of load-in and most of strike and it was super intense. The week before, various shifts of people were in the shop building 17 very large wooden platforms that we sunk into the pond so Eiko and Koma could walk along their dance pathway and didn't have to awkwardly tread water while trying to perform.

The whole show experience ended up being so beautiful. The pathway from the parking lot to the pond was lined with candle luminaries, the sun had just set so the crickets and frogs were chirping, there were yummy smelling citronella candles too.

For anyone that has ever seen these two perform, you know what I mean when I say they move slowly. It's nice and beautiful, but seeing it once was enough for me. My favorite part of the performance was all the different elements you could pay attention to. At some moments, I just stared at the stars, listened to the insects and music, enjoyed the reflecting ripple effect the stage lights created on the surrounding trees...it was pretty pleasant. Very humid though.

Emanuel Gat - Brilliant Corners (2011) in DPAC:
This was the only show of the summer I'm sorry to say that I might have fallen asleep during...I don't think I actually did, but I definitely rested my eyes for a part of it. The lights were all overhead and were focused into a huge box. They were bright in the beginning but became uncomfortably dim throughout the entire middle section, which made it hard to focus so eventually my eyes just decided it was time to close.

Doug Varone and Dancers - Chapters from a Broken Novel in Reynolds:

Hands down my favorite show of the summer. I was on rail for the show so I couldn't watch it from the house, but I always stood as far downstage as I could during the shows so I could see it from as front as possible! His choreography is just my favorite way to move and getting to watch it up close by professional dancers four times was just extraordinary. AND he is coming to Beckley in September to set one of his pieces on us (West Virginia Dance Company) that we'll get to perform this season! So puuumped!

Shen Wei Dance Arts - Limited States in DPAC:

And this was my least favorite show of the season. Shen Wei dancers are such ridiculously beautiful dancers but over half the performance was improvised (I read that in an article so my inclinations while watching the show were true) and there were SO MANY technical elements that just made it way too much. Way too much. Not a fan at all this time around.

Past/Forward: Twyla Tharp's Sweet Fields, Martha Clarke's Etudes for Italy, and Bulareyaung Pagarlava's Landscapes 2011 ADF in Reynolds:

What a crazy show!! I was sound board operator and it was one of the more involved crew jobs I had this season. All three pieces were lovely and had really captivating parts that I didn't mind watching so many times. Since this show is performed by ADF students, there is a lot more time devoted to teching and rehearsing the pieces. It was great watching dancers I've taken class with perform on stage.

Paul Taylor Dance Company - Company B, The Uncommitted, Promethean Fire in DPAC:

Although I'm not much of a PTDC fan, this year's repertoire was more enjoyable than last year's. I don't have much to say, really. My favorite part was dressing up, sitting in the balcony, and watching the surprise flash mob that took place during the first intermission.

And BAM. ADF 2011 is over...so sad when something this amazing is finished, but...on to the next adventure...

Rosie Herrera and Pilobolus

I fully anticipated that this would be the craziest and/or funnest week of the summer and it was certainly both of those things.

This week at ADF we saw:

Rosie Herrera perform Dining Alone (2011) and Pity Party (2010)  in Reynolds:

Where to start?! She was pretty easily my favorite show of last year's ADF so I, understandably, had very high expectations for her return. While it was a wonderful show, I was almost a little disappointed from all the changes that were made to Pity Party. I definitely didn't expect it to be completely identical, but it was pretty drastically altered and with a much smaller cast so my happy memories of what would happen next weren't there.

Dining Alone, on the other hand, totally delighted me. The use of music, the star drop and piano player, the use of plates, and mixture of funny with meaningful continued to surprise and entertain me. It is safe to say that I'm a huge fan of Rosie and her wacktacular visions and dreams she lets us witness.

We also saw:
Pilobolus perform Untitled (1975), Seraph (2011), Korokoro (2011), All is Not Lost (2011), and Day Two (1980) in DPAC.

Need I say much about Pilobolus? Well, I will because they are that fantastic. Not only are they extremely and often unhumanly talented, but they are completely pleasant, friendly people who thanked us crew people incessantly and didn't take long to introduce themselves to us.

Clips from Untitled can be found all over YouTube - one of their early masterpieces. Seraph was a little silly if you looked at it from a purely artistic point of view, but the entertainment value was undeniable. A mostly-naked, long haired, Hawaiian man encountering two robot helicopters flown by MIT Robotics guys? Come on. Clip from the press call here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk82Y5vVbmc

Korokoro was a beauuuutiful piece choreographed by Takuya Muramatsu of the huge Japanese butoh company Dairakudakan. The best possible fusion of butoh and Pilobolus. I didn't understand the use of the projections that were used because the time or two I was able to watch the piece from the front I couldn't notice them at all. And it was impossible to perceive them from my backstage view during the shows so I'm not sure how the audience reacted to them.

All Is Not Lost was just the epitome of COOL. First of all, it's the music video for OK Go's song of the same name. It's performed on top of a 700-pound, several foot-high plexiglass table. There's a camera directly underneath the table pointing up and its image is projected on a big screen on the other side of the stage. Half of the dance is choreographed in a way so the projection looks like a kaleidoscope. Just by sitting/standing/rolling on the plexiglass with even numbers of people in symmetrical patterns in the same color unitard, it totally tricks your eye.

Day Two is another early years masterpiece that is epic and primal and performed solely in thongs (the majority of this show was performed in the near-nude) and ends with a massive bow sequence. I won't go into the super specifics of our crew jobs to prepare for this (but believe me, there are many) but after we peel back two entire marley sections in seconds, the dancers pour four huge buckets of water onto the stage and they push off blocks we screw into the floor and hold down so they propel themselves slip-n-slide style across the stage as the curtain comes back up. We also have to catch dancers as they slide offstage at fairly dangerous speeds. So intense.

Working this show was a completely welcome and enjoyable challenge and saying goodbye to Pilobolus was very sad. But that's how festivals go I guess...they leave as quickly as they arrive.

Coming up in my next post: Eiko and Koma in the Sarah Duke Gardens pond and Emanuel Gat in DPAC.

Tao Dance Theater and DCDC/Evidence

This past week at the ADF we saw:
Tao Dance Theater perform 2 (2011) in Reynolds:


Hmm. Tao…I'm still not quite sure what to say about it. But it definitely left an impression that I've been thinking on occasionally, which is great! Leaving an impression (of any kind) is probably the best achievement a dance can have.


Okay, first I will say that the way these two dancers move is really amazing and I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s like they have no joints (hips and shoulders especially), their skin and muscles are made of rubber, and they’re attached to strings that are being controlled by someone else. They just flopped about in ridiculous ways and it was great and so interesting to watch for a while. After about 20 minutes of the same vocabulary and repetition of some phrases, I started to zone out. They were on the floor the entire 50-minute piece and there's only so much you can do with your body by staying within such a restricted field.


The program notes for this piece said that the music was composed based on a recording of these dancers having a conversation and its rhythm. I was looking forward to hearing that in the music but it was so severely electronic with beeps, pops, static, and extremely high pitched whistles that it was uncomfortable to listen to.


Regarding the title of their piece, 2, they made it clear that you could interpret that any way you wanted.. It could mean the number of dancers in the piece, how many works these dancers have done together, etc. Obviously you make your own perception of a title for any piece of dance you see, but when the artists bring that idea to an audience's attention, I think about it in a different way. I appreciate their talents and certainly their passion, just not necessarily for me.


We also saw:
Dayton Contemporary Dance Company perform Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder (1959) and Vespers (1986) and Evidence, A Dance Company perform On Earth Together (2011) and Grace (1999) in DPAC.

This was a nice show to work on because the dancers were really pleasant and friendly, which makes all the difference. I was on rail for this show so I brought the curtain in/out after/before each piece and changed out drops when necessary. That curtain is SO heavy that my hands, arms, and torso were super sore and aware of all movement all week long. I wore my work gloves but even they had layers worn off by the time the run was over. Just glad it wasn't my fingers that had layers worn off.

I enjoyed DCDC's dancing more, but grooved to Evidence's music more. DCDC brought two of their classics from years and years ago that were both beautiful. Rainbow was danced, mostly, by a group of men. The piece is about a chain gang and tells a very clear story. There's a really interesting dynamic when a group of dancers in the present day learns and performs a work that was made so long ago.  It feels like a tribute. It's such a marathon piece too. Those guys were absolutely heaving by the end. And I'll just say that we always had to do a quick mop of the stage before the next piece.

DCDC's second piece, Vespers, opened the second act. This one was my favorite of the show. It was performed by a group of totally fierce women. The sound score is two tracks of thick percussion that begin right away with one special focused on a woman in a chair upstage right. The first section consists of a solo for the first dancer which develops into a duet when another dancer enters about halfway through. The second section consists of several women, two preset chairs for each. This piece is a runaway train with the consistent pounding percussion, challenging and precise choreography, and the tangible power and drive these women have. Really great to watch from backstage. All their faces were so intense the whole time. Epic blackout at the end. Gave me chills!

Evidence's style is one that I admire simply because I've taken African dance classes before and have severely stuck out with my whiteness. It's effortless and relaxed to watch but for some reason when I've tried to replicate it, I end up embarassing myself! Both their pieces were in that style and the music was rockin'. For On Earth Together, all the music was by Stevie Wonder and their last piece Grace had pumpin' beats that totally had me groovin' in my chair backstage.

My favorite part about these companies was how nice the dancers were to us. Crew folk tend to be forgotten so it's always so nice to be thanked after a show run since we worked so hard to make it possible for them. The DCDC dancers that weren't in the other DCDC piece being performed would sit backstage or stand in the wings and dance along or give encouragement, which was so cute to watch.

Coming up this week: ROSIE HERRERA in Reynolds and PILOBOLUS in DPAC. This week is going to be the best of the summer...I can feel it :)

Yossi/Oded and Bill T. Jones

This past week at the ADF we saw:
YOSSI BERG & ODED GRAF's company perform Animal Lost (2010) in the Reynolds Theatre:

This evening-length piece was quite a spectacle. The six dancers each had their own different animal mask (a penguin, polar bear, panda bear, horse, pig, and rabbit), there was a lot of text and singing, and it closed with the group sitting upstage, past a partly-opened black traveler, on astroturf, singing a song, while someone played guitar and another kept squirting a dancer in the face with a watergun. All very imaginative and fun.

There was a sound score going almost the entire time so it was hard to hear some of the text, but what I did hear was funny! But it wasn't just funny, these dancers are technically proficient and most of the middle was beautifully choreographed duets. It progressed well and it had a clear beginning, middle, and end, which left me quite satisfied as an audience member. Seeing it once was plenty for me. While I could examine this work and how it speaks to the animal inside each of us, I'll let your imagination make of it what it will. (The ADF website has a great advertisement clip of it.)

We also saw:

BILL T. JONES/ARNIE ZANE DANCE COMPANY perform Spent Days Out Yonder (2000), Continuous Replay (1997, revised in 1991), and D-Man in the Waters (1989, revised in 1998) in DPAC.

I knew this company was, and still is, a huge deal, but I got to witness it live for the first time this past weekend. I went to Friday's and Saturday's shows, which had a post performance discussion I stuck around for on Friday. The first and last pieces were performed with live accompaniment by members of the Durham Symphony. A string quartet for Spent Days, and an octet for D-Man.

This show was so wonderful! I wasn’t the biggest fan of Spent Days the first time I saw it because the dancers face upstage and perform the same phrase but it was never quite in unison. I don't know if that was the intention, but their shapes didn't always look the same and the timing was sometimes drastically different. My favorite part of that particular piece was the music - Mozart's String Quartet No. 23 in F Major,
K. 590, Andante (1790).

Continuous Replay was unbelievable! The dancers (whole company) began nude and filtered onstage at different times, in different ways. There is only one constant throughout the piece, "the clock", who is on stage the entire time, repeating a sequence of 45 shapes over and over again and adding one shape with each repetition. The dancers slowly begin to appear with one item of black clothing, a skirt or a hat or a pair of shoes, and keeps evolving until the end of the piece has everyone except "the clock" wearing flowing white costumes. Such an intense ending! Definitely one of the memorable "I LOVE DANCE!!!" moments to be had this summer.

An audience member at the PPD asked the dancers what they thought about dancing nude. One dancer mentioned that after being nude for a while, your skin starts to feel like clothing on your bones and ripples similarly to a loose costume fabric (WOW, amazing!). Another audience member commented that after the initial shock of seeing someone not wearing anything, you just begin to appreciate the human form. The muscles, the different heights and sizes of the dancers, the way light creates shadows on skin. It's not 'being naked', "the clock" Erick Montes said, it's just nudity.

The composer of the music for this piece was there at the concert and mixed it live during the show. He commented that he keeps to mostly the same sounds, template, and progression, but does enjoy throwing little extra things into the score to play with the dancers and see how/if they react to them.

D-Man was just unstoppable! It was the entire second half of the show. I've heard so many dance teachers telling students to take more risks in class and this was the absolute perfect example of how amazing it can look. Falling off balance blindly and hoping you don't trip, hurling yourself into the air with all force and trusting your partner to catch you in crazy and different ways. So so exciting!! It was composed of four (or maybe five?) sections, all of which were intensely beautiful and moved along so quickly. This piece was a marathon.

I loved them and would recommend them to anyone. Each dancer is so unique and, while I sometimes pick a a 'favorite' to watch, every one of these dancers was my favorite for different reasons. An audience member asked how these dancers were picked for the company, and the short answer, given by the associate artistic director Janet Wong was, "They have to be FIERCE!"

(*Maybe at this point I should just make it clear that I'm in no way a professional dance critic and this is just my personal opinion about these performances at this point in my life.*)

Coming up this week: TAO DANCE THEATRE from China (their USA debut!) in Reynolds, and DAYTON CONTEMPORARY DANCE COMPANY and EVIDENCE, A DANCE COMPANY in DPAC (shared show). Stay tuned. :)

ADF - Week one!

Performance week one was a success! The ADF school dancers showed up a few days ago and have been taking preview classes and doing other orientation type things before classes start on Thursday morning.

This past weekend, ROSAS, a big-deal company from Belgium, started the season off with a bang in the Reynolds theatre. I'd done some research on them in the spring and loved the videos I found of the piece they brought, Rosas danst Rosas.

I was on crew for this show (I requested to work with them!) so I was involved in loading them in, setting them up, and just being there for anything they might need while they were with us. I was on wardrobe for ROSAS so my job was to talk to the dancers and see what they needed regarding costumes. My job involved coming in a few hours early each day to dry the clothes that hadn't air-dried all the way overnight, rolling up the long sleeves of their costume shirts and stitching them in place so they wouldn't fall down, ironing the shirts and skirts, and laying out each dancer's leotard and stockings. They also had socks and shoes they picked out and placed themselves.

We had been hanging and cabling the lights they needed the day before and were as prepared for them as we could be when they arrived on June 9 and we loaded them in. They had an entire storage unit full of wooden crates they shipped (or flew?) over that we brought up to the stage. 

Their stage is as follows: Instead of solely using the normal pipes that run from stage left to stage right, they had one for each side of the stage that ran upstage to downstage. The only way to hang them like that is to connect them to normal-facing pipes in several different places and fly them out at the same time. Directly beneath these pipes on the floor were mirrors that were set up on an angle facing the stage so the lights above would bounce off and shoot out straight onto the stage. They used their own marley so we laid that out for them and hung a backdrop that was made of a thick, shiny, black plastic material that reflected light in a neat way.

We began light focus after lunch and for the times when we weren't involved with focusing a light, we were doing other small cleanup jobs around the stage area. We didn't have intern light or sound board operators for this show because the technicians for the company had it all on their own equipment that they bring. The rest of the night they ran the tech rehearsal, while the crew stood by. The next day, we did some touch-up focusing and I began my costume prep work.

Then it was showtime! WOW. I’ve never seen anything like it. While it wasn’t the greatest thing I’ve ever seen, it certainly was incredible. It’s rare that you get to observe someone repeating something over and over and over and over again for an hour and 45 minutes with repetitive, Reich-esque music as the accompaniment. There are a few different sections (one of which is in complete silence) but they each consisted of one movement phrase that varied subtly as the piece progressed. Some audience members obviously couldn't take the repetition and walked out of the theatre, but I was intrigued just about the whole time.

I think it progressed beautifully. Maybe it was more apparent to me because I dance, but all the subtleties were pretty genius. HOW long does it take to learn a piece like this?! To learn the phrase, match the timing/angles/breath patterns near perfectly with the other three dancers, and then go back and change teeny tiny elements individually. And nobody ever (clearly) messed up! It is so precise down to the count. They were totally programmed for that dance.

The next show night was the presentation of the Samuel H. Scripps/ADF award for ROSAS' creator and choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker to recognize her lifetime achievement in dance (and has previously been awarded to dancers such as Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Alvin Ailey, Pina Bausch, Pilobolus, and others). It was also her birthday and she decided to perform in the show that evening. This evening-length piece has been in the repertoire since the company's beginning in the early 80s. It was neat to see her perform for a little bit from backstage. :)

I really enjoy being on crew for pieces and getting the opportunity to see them multiple times because I pick up so many new things each time I get to watch it. By the final show I had finally nailed down the rhythms I was hearing in the music, which was pretty satisfying.
My favorite section involves the four dancers sitting in chairs spread out on the stage. (A video version of it is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQCTbCcSxis) The music was the most satisfying to me and the movement in the chairs was so compelling.

All the interns and floating technicians came to help with strike, which I was extremely happy about. Struck the chairs first, then mirrors and stands, then floor, boom pipes, and backdrop. 8 or 10 of us went to the rail to complicatedly bring out/in the various electrics that were connected to things. Took a while. Then we struck most of the electrics, loaded fresnels onto the lift, and helped the Belgians pack the container to ship back home. We got out around 11:20 and said bye to the technicians Simo and Wannes. Saying goodbye to companies is the saddest part! And I’m sad I didn’t get to say goodbye to the dancers, but that usually happens since they just run offstage, shower, and leave.

**Coming up this week!**

Tuesday and Wednesday in Reynolds theatre - Yossi Berg and Oded Graf from Israel

Thursday-Saturday in DPAC - Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company

I'm not on a crew this week so I get to jump theatres and see both shows from the house. I'll report back next week!

ADF - The first 3 days

Made it! Wednesday morning I left home and moved down to Durham, NC for the summer to work as a production intern for the American Dance Festival. I'm living with two people I worked with last year in a beautiful warehouse-turned-apartment complex downtown.

So far our work has been picking up, delivering, laying, screwing down, and laying marley on the dance floors for the rooms where classes will take place starting next week. We've had a load of free time since we only had 3 floors to do this weekend that many of us spent laying out at Duke's central campus pool and getting to know each other. We've done a lot of baking, bread-making, and cooking here in our apartment. We even met our neighbors!

Tomorrow the REAL work begins. The new faces will get the quick and dirty electrics lesson in one of the theatres, while the rest of us will be put straight to work. We have two shows opening our first weekend, which doesn't usually happen, so we'll all be working 14-hour days straight away. Since this is the ADF director's last year (he's retiring) there's a special gala performance containing a few of his favorite companies on June 9th at DPAC in downtown Durham (Scottish Dance Theatre, Hubbard Street, Mark Dendy, Martha Clarke, and the African American Dance Ensemble). Reynolds Theatre on Duke's west campus opens with Rosas, a Belgian company, Friday thru Sunday. (*See my older post Massive American Dance Festival 2011 preview! to get info on this company and check out some vids!*)

If you're within a reasonable radius of Durham, you must make it up to see a show or several. If you're a little farther out, I strongly encourage you to make a weekend trip to see one of your favorite dance companies. I'll keep this updated as the summer progresses (hopefully weekly) and look forward to all the new experiences this summer has in store. :)

A Little Inspiration: Books and Religion

Ever since I graduated from JMU last fall (a whole year ago...can't believe it), I've picked up reading for fun. As long as I can remember, I've hated reading because a vast majority of everything I've ever read was somehow assigned to me and I expected to be graded and/or tested on it. Pressure like that cultured my hatred of reading. But now that I can read whatever on Earth I want (and God-forbid stop reading something if I don't like it!), I've read several books and have informally narrowed down my favorite genre.

NON-FICTION! Or inspired-by-true-events type deals. Other than Harry Potter, I feel like I'm wasting my time reading about something that has never happened and would rather read about something that will teach me about religion, a significant person, events in the world, religions, or an individual's experiences. Some of these books have included Deepak Chopra's Muhammad; The Diary of Anne Frank; Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea; The Autobiography of Malcolm X; and The Kite Runner (this one's pushing it, though, since it's just loosely based on real events). Right now I'm working on Eat Pray Love and am LOVING it (the movie disappointed me just a little). So many interests I have all rolled up into one book. I'm just not a novel girl.

In many of these books I've recently read, I've folded down pages with quotes I especially liked and thought I'd share some here! Maybe for technical reasons I should say that I'm not trying to force an opinion on anybody. These are just things that I read that made me think and/or I liked the meaning, the wording, the philosophy, or anything in between. First book I'll share things from:

·        “'God thinks about everything, and he does it all at once.  That’s what makes him God.'” – pg. 9

·       "Indecency is how men know that they are men." – pg. 42

·        "Many years later I was out walking and happened to see a figure crouched in an alley.  The light was dim, but I made out Muhammad squatting on his heels.  I nodded.  He put his fingers to his lips and pointed at something on the ground.  A mouse.  The creature had been lured out into the open with a few grains of wheat.

Then Muhammad gazed up at the sky, where a black speck hovered.  My eyes were failing, but I knew it was a hawk.  Muhammad looked back at the mouse, then at the hawk again.

'It has no idea of the danger,' he said.

'Neither do we,' I replied.

You see the point? Like the mouse innocently eating its seeds, we go about our lives not realizing that death is watching us from afar, constantly stalking.  Those were Muhammad’s inner thoughts." – pg. 61

·        “'Allah is in all creatures.'” – pg. 99

·        “'There is your common Arab,' said Waraqah.  'He walks in circles and thinks he’s getting somewhere.  Tie an idol to his nose, and he thinks the gods are leading the way to Paradise.'” – pg. 114

·        “'A grateful dog is worth more than an ungrateful man.'” – pg. 120

·        “'…My secret is that God is not someone you can seek.  He is in all things, and always has been.  He created this earth and then disappeared into it, like an ocean disappearing into a drop of water…'” pg. 135

·        “'Blind eyes see more than a blind heart.'” – pg. 156

·        “'A promise is a cloud.  Fulfillment is the rain.'” – pg. 158

·        "How foolish we are here believing we act for ourselves, when God is the only mover." – pg. 195

·        “'I took a walk out of town yesterday. I saw hills and rocks and trees the same as you.  But this time God showed them to me with new eyes, and I rejoiced.' He smiled beatifically.  'Is it not wonderful how God brings us victory in His very creation?'” – pg. 217