Re-Visitation Rights Peter Schmitz and Alumni Dancers Revisit Old Material to Create Original Work

Author: Kate Prouty

Memory playing tricks on you is not necessarily the worst thing in the world, unless maybe you can't remember why it is you walked into a room. But when material from a performance two years ago reinvents itself into an original dance piece, then it's somewhat of a mental blessing.
All alumni of Middlebury College, Katherine Ferrier '91, Lisa Gonzales '94, Pam Vail '90 and Paul Matteson '00 reunited last Friday night not only with one another at their alma mater, but also with old material. Brought together for "Schmitz and Dancers," the modern dance performance included a solo from each dancer followed by a quartet choreographed by Peter Schmitz, professor of dance.
The choreography they used was original and direct, and yet firmly grounded in the recent past. At moments, especially in the quartet "Scenes From a Steep Step," the dancers borrowed ideas and even movement material from previous work.
Each solo, created by the dancers separately from one another, was distinct in style. No thematic connections were intended to exist between the pieces. However, these four alumni have been dancing together — mostly in New York with The Architects, an improvisational quartet, and the Ensemble Project — since they left Middlebury, so there were bound to be resonances among the works.
Ferrier opened the evening with "Over" performed to sound samples from Meredith Monk, Christopher Hughes, Georges Aperghis and Shawn Colvin that she had mixed together. The music was marked by the pulsing of a heartbeat, children laughing, seagulls crying and train whistles blowing making for a lusciously thick audio atmosphere. Her movement was equally complex. Extremely gestural, Ferrier's limbs traced lines through the space as did her intentionally outward-looking gaze. Her performance was simultaneously introverted, carefully drawing a line with her finger from her hand to her shoulder, and confrontational, boldly scanning the audience with her eyes.
Gonzales, who performed her solo "a brave brave bull" next, danced the same line between introspection and extrovertion. Her performance also wavered between sanity and absurdity. Dressed in a ridiculously large white hoop skirt and toting a black parasol, Gonzales was the image of a fairy tale. Yet she was no innocent Alice, but rather an opium-addicted, dignified mademoiselle trying to get to what feels like a safe place. Flower petals cascaded out from under her umbrella, which she clutched desperately over her head as if she was suffocating under the feather-light weight of the parasol.
She used text to try to convince herself that "It's OK" and that she'll "Just start again" and yet, in the end, she is "... a body pressed to the floor about to explode."
Like Gonzales, the next soloist, Vail, was both vulnerable and aggressive. In "Spoke," Vail started downstage in a nauseous hunch, bent over with her hands weighing heavily on her thighs preparing to make a move. Throughout the piece she moved with grace underlined by anger. She wrapped her arms around her body and craned her neck awkwardly forward in struggle. These movements and her frequent changes of pace and tempo implied conflict.
Matteson, perhaps the star of the show, also visited this theme of struggle in his solo "Dawn," effortlessly dancing the act of exerting effort.
Whether it was his foot refusing to unflex while the rest of his body floated gracefully above or his neck craning uncomfortably forward, Matteson has mastered the art of being awkward. Dressed like Billy Elliot in a collar shirt, striped and buttoned to the top, navy highwaters and beat-up dress shoes, he was definitely playing the part. He blundered, he failed to balance on his tiptoes and he fell nearly flat on his face.
He was of course only pretending. Matteson, by nature, is anything but awkward. After seeing him dance on Friday night you need no confirmation, but here's some anyway: He was awarded, on Friday night, a Bessie for performance.
The Bessies, named after the master teacher Bessie Schönberg Varley, who died in 1997, are awarded by Dance Theater Workshop and are the equivalent of the Oscars for dance. After dancing in New York for only two years after his graduation from Middlebury in 2000, Matteson is one of the greenest dancers to be selected for a Bessie.
If this kind of movement seems strikingly natural to and easy for Matteson, it's because you may have seen it before. The theme of attempting to complete a task and pretending to fail is recurring in his repertoire. It was one he explored previously at the College in May of 2000 with his senior work entitled, perhaps ironically, "Here We Go Again." Specifically the solo that he choreographed and performed "Face Value" presented a man trying to piece together the memories of a dance over and over again.
Not only Matteson's material revisited the past. The group piece choreographed by Schmitz, which ended the concert, also referenced previous work. "Scenes From a Steep Step" was structured loosely around ideas from "Felt Presence of an Absence," also choreographed by Schmitz but performed in March 2000 by the Dance Company of Middlebury (DCM). Ferrier, Gonzales, Vail and Matteson all performed as alumni with the DCM in 2000, so Schmitz was able to take a few sections built primarily around this quartet and rebuild them for Friday's performance. We saw again the casual kisses that Matteson stole — or tried to steal — from the others, complex partnering and lifting sequences and the playful pushing between Ferrier and Matteson.
They also used "ideas" from "Felt Presence" to develop new material. Schmitz recognized, "ideas about relationships between people. Primarily spatial relationships, not emotional relationships" are driving themes of both pieces.
This way of revisiting material and themes is how a lot of modern dance is composed. It's not plagiarizing, it's just a body remembering a situation and recreating it. Dancers' bodies have habits and tendencies, just as writers have a particular style or tone. Old material leaves an imprint in one's memory, which, memories being altered, translates into new, original material.
As Schmitz wrote in the program for "Felt Presence," "Memory has a spatial presence. Strong, resolute, unforgiving memory is, in particular for me, an occupant of space." "Scenes from a Steep Step," as well as the solos performed last weekend, are resurrections of past experiences, like a painting of a landscape recalled from memory, but they are also projections of that same landscape in its present, and newly different, state.