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. :)