Jan. 21-22 at the Mahaney Center for the Arts the Dance Company premiered their semester long project, “Culture, cash and community: to have or have not.” Students, Artistic Director Christal Brown, and visiting artists Trebien Pollard and Paloma McGregor choreographed the suite of four dances. Although each piece stands on its own, taken together they compose a meditation on New Orleans.
The performances at the College were only the beginning, as the Company traveled to New Orleans at the end of Winter Term to perform at the Ashe Cultural Arts Center and participate in community work. Dane Verrett ’12 photographed their travels to his hometown as part of an ongoing commitment to documenting the intersection of the two vastly different communities he considers home — one nestled in the flat jetties of Louisiana, and the other in the rolling hills of Vermont. His work will be exhibited at the Mahaney Center for the Arts Feb. 10 from 12:30-1:20. Images featured will range from shots of the dancers to a larger collage piece. According to Verrett, the work is based on flood, city, structure and balance.
“I mostly shot the movements that resonated most with me, and those movements were generally from [Hurricane] Katrina,” Verrett said. “The first day I didn’t have any context, so I just watched how the dancers moved, how their characters moved. The single file marching in one dance reminded me of the National Guard coming in after Katrina. The dance about water obviously reminded me of the floods. And the one with the black costumes and crazy movements reminded me of people dispersing during the evacuation. Of course the joy of modern dance is that you get to interpret it how you want.”
The pieces, called episodes, are deliberately open-ended with names like “Building a Better Fishtrap” and “Falling Sun Wanting Moon, the desire for another day.” For Company members, interpretation is a dynamic concept that evolved over more than a semester spent thinking and moving to these dances. The Company choreographed a piece together, simply named “Strata,” which features characters — bank teller, schoolteacher, defense attorney and hobo, among others — invented by the dancers.
“We came up with the dance very early on, and we didn’t come up with the characters until much later,” Davis Anderson ’13 said. “The layers kept getting added and the piece kept getting deeper, right until the last performance. Midway through fall semester, I knew the piece. It wasn’t until J-term that it became obvious that it was not about the movements, but about the process. I knew the structure just walking through it, but not necessarily engaging in it. I had to live in the movements.”
A strong desire to live in the movements, to engage in them, understand and feel them, becomes evident talking to other Company members. When discussing performing the solo for the second episode, “Shaking the Devil: the black swan effect,” Jessica Lee ’13 described transitioning to a level of confidence in her muscle memory that allowed her to almost transcend the steps of the dance the second time around, in New Orleans.
“It was emotional to be there, to get off the highway from the airport and see the Super Dome, and to know that this was where all those people had been living after Katrina,” Lee said. “It was special to be there, in a sad, scary way. For the solo, I tried to tap into that kind of harsh feeling. There were very strong, almost random movements in it. I wanted to channel the pain of losing your home.”
Verrett captures this evolution of thought and movement not only in his photos, but also in a spoken word poem he wrote to go with the final episode in the program.
“I’ve been drawn to how people’s bodies and movements can reflect the way they are,” he said. “It changed how I write and photograph. I focus more on how people move, instead of only things like where they came from. I respect dancers for expressing how the mind works in a way literature and the visual arts just can’t.”
Dance company explores New Orleans in performance
Comments
