Performing Arts Spotlight: Dance Company of Middlebury

Join your peers this Saturday, Jan. 30, at 8 p.m. or Sunday, Jan. 31, at 2 p.m. in the Mahaney Center for the Arts Dance Theatre to enjoy the Dance Company of Middlebury’s annual performance.

From Somewhere culminates the two-semester creative process of the group, guided by Artistic Director Tzveta Kassabova in collaboration with Joshua Bisset and Laura Quattrocchi of Shua Group. The program includes the award-winning piece “The Opposite of Killing,” as well as “Motorless Park,” a work that draws on images, sound and energy derived from the group’s residency in Detroit, Michigan, offering a simultaneously beautiful and haunting portrait of human geography.

I was able to speak with two Company performers, Miguel Castillo ’17.5 and Huirong Jia ’17, to learn more about their upcoming performance.

What has been the creative process behind From Somewhere?

Miguel Castillo: The piece “Motorless Park” was conceived in the heat of Sept. in Detroit. To begin DCM’s season, we conducted a movement research trip, pulling inspiration from the urban decay of the city, the abandoned buildings and tires left behind by the collapse of the automobile industry that once drove Detroit’s economy. We made the piece in an abandoned parking lot, with the heat of the asphalt, the grime of salvaged tires and the sweat of our exertion informing the movement vocabulary.

Huirong Jia: The bigger question behind our piece asks how we can deal with the consequence that we created. Detroit used to be the great symbol of industrial prosperity. Various reasons drove people out of Detroit. What is left and how should we deal with it? When we came to Detroit, tires were everywhere. Tires, unlike the ruins of the antiquities, were the materialized history of Detroit. Through the performance with tires, our piece intends to build that empathy, which could link anyone with that period of history, and to ask the bigger question of what have we created in the past century.

Why does this piece matter to Middlebury and to a larger audience?

MC: It is difficult to pin down why any piece of art matters, exactly. Dance especially plays with those realities and experiences which speak in physicality and sensation rather than rational, verbal expression.

However, particularly in “Motorless Park,” the use of tires may bring into question the results of urbanization and the motor vehicle industry, and in turn the relationship we humans have with our technologies and the infrastructures and industries that we create and end up shaping the way we live our lives.

HJ: The whole dance experience challenges the idea of the liberal arts and the relation between depth and width in education. I, as a humanities major, always spend extra hours to achieve the same quality of the movement as that of other dance majors in the Company. These hours, which I used to spend on reading and writing, are spent on technique training, building relations with dancers and trying to disentangle the idea of art. Though I do not spend all of my time reading Nietzsche and Burke, I better understand the part of me which I never explored before: I have acquired another non-verbal way of expression, I have started to appreciate another way of life and I have discovered there are so many different kinds of intelligence that have are not recognized or defined by various authorities. I think we could all thicken our texture of life by both diversifying and deepening these experiences.

What is it like dancing with the Company?

MC: The Dance Company of Middlebury is an opportunity to simulate the experience of being in a real dance company. It is a particularly rich experience because of the intensity of the commitment. Over the entire fall semester and then into our J-term tour and performance period, we spend a generous amount of time getting to know our director and the members of the company in a way an academic engagement can’t quite match. It is also somewhat exciting to be in the Company that tours to represent Middlebury’s Dance Program to the wider world – this year, DCM travelled to Detroit and Washington D.C.

HJ: Dancing with the Company is an adventure to me. During each rehearsal at Middlebury, we come up with new ideas of movements to experiment. During our trips, we have to deal with every kind of accident, especially weather, and come up with a new plan for the next day. This whole experience has been really disorienting but also fruitful. I have learned to experience a life with uncertainty and spontaneity.

Tickets for either performance are $12 for the general public; $10 for Middlebury ID holders; and $6 for students. To find more information or purchase tickets, visit go/boxoffice or stop by either of the box offices in McCullough or the MCA.