If you ever wondered how a work of choreography comes into being, Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre’s “Inside/Out” spring initiative, in collaboration with Old Town School of Folk Music, is a perfect opportunity to see the choreographic process in action.
“Inside/Out” is an effort to engage audiences in that process and, in choreographer Sherry Zunker’s words, show “how we got there.” This past Thursday was the first in an initial series of three public performances the collaborative company of dancers, musicians, and visual artists is launching at Old Town School of Folk Music prior to its formal Fall 2016 performance season at Links Hall.
CRDT Artistic Director Wilfredo Rivera characterized the interactive aspect of the initiative as an effort to create a “tapestry of Chicago audiences” through exposure to the inner working of the creative process and dialog between choreographers, dancers, musicians, and audience members. The interdisciplinary, collaborative core of Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre’s work makes this company an especially interesting subject for such a forum.
Thursday’s program brought commissioned choreographer Sherry Zunker, ten CRDT dancers, and three CRDT musicians (piano, drums, and clarinet/saxophone) together in Old Town School’s black box performance space for a highly entertaining, thought-provoking, and revelatory hour of dance, music, and dialog.
Making dance is a mysterious venture, unleashing the essence of human impulse, mining the deepest secrets of what makes us singularly human. As the only animals in the earthly garden who create art, we are a strange beast, part playful child, curious scientist, and inspired visionary.
All three were in abundant evidence at Thursday’s performance, which began with what Zunker called, “the most put-together” part of her work with the company to date. She introduced the first section of the jazz-based piece as her effort to “explore human contact, and its impact on relationships.” The ten dancers performed set choreography to composer and company music director Joe Cerqua’s score, developed in an initial two-hour rehearsal with the musicians, Zunker, and the dancers. “It’s a constant back and forth between us,” Zunker said of her collaboration with Cerqua.
The resulting fabric of music and dance introduced the individuality of each dancer in a catalogue of sensuality, with long attenuated arabesques breathing into sustained relevés, plenty of multiple slinky pirouettes, air-born escapes, and an exchange that had the dancers getting up and sitting down in a flow of give-and-take from a row of chairs across the back of the stage, directly in front of the musicians. The liberating swell of jazz saxophone, cascading keyboard runs, and rhythmic shifts from the drums wove its way between the dancers’ bodies and through the space, knitting movement and sound into a wholly pleasing canvas.
The second segment of the program came from Zunker’s improvisational work with the dancers. For her initial encounter with the company, Zunker had each of the dancers bring in a piece of music they loved and then dance to it, “so they could show me who they are.” With a diversity of body types and individual movement styles, the ten very appealing and accomplished dancers were coached to play off each other and the musicians. Zunker used videotapes of each rehearsal to build her favorite moments and bring them back to the dancers. Their improvised work inspired Zunker and became the basis for set movement phrases, which the dancers could then manipulate within the framework of a few rules. The first rule was “don’t move unless you really feel like it;” the second, “connect in any way you like, except no touching of hands.”
Having shared that information with the audience, we were treated to an inside look at Zunker’s choreographic process, wherein the dancers performed the same choreography to three different pieces of pre-recorded music which the choreographer had brought into rehearsal. The audience was able to see how contrasting musical structures and moods changed the look, and the meaning, of relationships in the choreography.
The first view showed five dancers performing the set movement phrases to a jazzy song. The second was a male/female duet to the same music. The dancers were told they could perform the movement with any speed variances they wished. The third viewing was the same movement for five dancers to completely different music, a slow piano and violin piece with emotional overtones of longing and loss. The fourth, to yet another piece of music, introduced two couples, one male/female, and the other female/female, still using the same movement vocabulary as with the previous viewings.
In an expression of child-like delight and wonder, Zunker articulated the audience’s unspoken discovery: “Every time you change the music, or performance partners, something different happens.”
The final segment of the program brought on-stage musicians and dancers back together for an improvisational mirror game wherein the dancers used their movement to deliberately manipulate the musician’s interaction, and vice-versa, with the ultimate goal being a simultaneous mirroring in a seamless interplay of music and movement. My only regret is that they had to stop.
As the audience spilled out into the corridors of The Old Town School of Folk Music, a guitar class was underway upstairs, while strains of bluegrass music wafted up from the lobby where a collection of banjos, bass fiddles, mandolins, guitars, and singers practiced their art. With the stuff of noble human endeavor so vibrantly present all around us, could we help but contrast this taste of paradise with the devastation so recently unleashed on the world by inhuman acts?
“My job,” said Zunker, “is watching and recognizing something that’s going to be beautiful.” Indeed!
Ferocious and gentle, soothing and disturbing, celestial messenger, canary in the coal mine, or enabler of the human spirit, art tells us who we are, where we have been, and where we are going.
If you missed this wonderful event, you can champion the human spirit and come see the next two “Inside/Out” performances by Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre. On April 14th, company dancer and choreographer Marc Macaranas will showcase his developing work to the music of Miles Davis. On May 12th, choreographer Raphaelle Ziemba will present her work-in-progress, also exploring the music of Miles Davis. Both programs take place at 6 PM, at The Old Town School of Folk Music. For tickets, go to seechicagodance.com and click on “Upcoming Events.”