Upcoming shows explore dance from opposite perspectives
by Leslie Wylie
Modern dance innovator Martha Graham had a lot to say about the proper training of a dancer. The process, as she saw it, was twofold. First, the dancer must develop his or her own physicality through disciplined study and practice, the goal being to transform the body into an instrument capable of precisely communicating movement’s language. “Then,” Graham wrote in her memoir Blood Memory, “comes the cultivation of the being from which whatever you have to say comes.... Every dance is a kind of fever chart, a graph of the heart.”
Learning how to translate the soul into the body’s syntax, as Graham pointed out, means a lifetime of painstaking negotiations between the inner and outer facets of one’s existence. But for many dancers, including a number of Knoxvillians, the pleasure is in the education.
Eighteen-year-old Kristen Carlson is a full-time UT freshman with a full-time dance schedule. In addition to schoolwork, she’s preparing to perform four different pieces in the Go! Contemporary Dance Works show on Feb. 21 as well as one in the University of Tennessee Dance Company annual show the following weekend.
“It’s just crazy right now,” she says. “A lot of the dancers in Go! are in high school, and tomorrow [Presidents’ Day] they’re out. But I do have school, so I have to skip all of my classes to do a run-through rehearsal.”
But Carlson takes it in stride. There’s room enough in her life for both her mind and her body, she says, and talks about fitting a stint with a professional dance company into her collegiate plans, which she hopes will culminate in a dual degree in Journalism and English.
“I look at dancing as relief. I’m used to it, because that’s all I’ve done for years,” she explains.
Carlson’s self-balance makes her involvement in the two upcoming shows, each of which make a unique demand upon her personal composition, seem appropriate. While the UT performance is traditionally an aesthetic and conceptual showcase, the premiere of Go! intends to place an additional emphasis on the more rigorous physical aspects of dance.
Lisa Hall McKee, owner and director of Go!’s home base, Studio Arts for Dancers, explains that she’s very interested in the athleticism of dance.
“There is such a fine line between dancers and athletes,” she says. “My thing is really to come up with aggressive approaches that are very technically correct but very interesting to watch, even to someone who doesn’t know much about dance.”
One copiously cardiovascular piece, for example, incorporates jump ropes. Another emphasizes yoga, a practice that is now often integrated into modern dance warm-ups as a stretching, relaxing and centering technique. Kris Beck, a local yoga instructor that McKee recruited to perform, readily grasps parallels between the practices, even though she admits to never having taken a dance class in her life.
“Yoga definitely has a dance-like quality to it. The two mirror each other,” Beck says. “The dancer has as much body awareness as does someone who does yoga. It’s about living and being in our own bodies, whereas a lot of people aren’t even in theirs.”
Angela Hill is one of a core group of professional local dancers who will be performing in the Go! premiere. She says that “Slipping,” a physically as well as emotionally strenuous piece involving movements on and around a cage, is one of the most challenging works she’s ever been involved with as far as sheer endurance and physical strength are concerned.
“It’s a very strong sort of aggressive kind of show,” Hill says of Go! in an effort to define its departure from the UTDC performance, which she is also involved with as an instructor and choreographer. Where Go! explores and pushes beyond the limitations of the body, UTDC prods at the conceptual capacities of dance’s various genres—ballet, jazz, tap and modern.
One of the most anticipated works to be performed is an impressionistic composition called “Traces,” arranged by award-winning choreographer Nathan Trice during his guest tenure with the program during the fall. Also, former Graham company dancer Laura Gagnon will oversee UTDC’s final performance of the 1936 Graham classic, “Steps in the Street.” A variety of other pieces range from the satirical to the meditative, including Melinda Brown Guion’s “Exactly,” a collaboration with the UT Percussion Ensemble that reconsiders conventional relations between motion and sound, and Hill’s “When the Dust Settles,” a ballet work that cerebrally stretches that genre’s vocabulary of movement.
The show’s mixed bag nature encourages the audience to continue readjusting its lenses in order to relate to the dances’ shifting natures and, in doing so, better comprehend the ways in which the audience itself relates to the world. Perhaps it is the intuitive need to complete this chain of dialogue—between dancer and dance, dance and audience, audience and experience of life—that the dancer, recognizing his or her own body as the most intimate medium, interprets as the need to dance in the first place.
“There are a lot of strengths to each of these shows,” Hill says. “If you had to choose between seeing one and the other, well, don’t. You’d be missing out if you missed either one.”
February 19, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 8
© 2004 Metro Pulse
| 
