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Australian Ballet Makes Big Impression in New York City

Susan Reiter — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 18:27:08 +0000

Fifty years is a milestone definitely worth celebrating, and the Australian Ballet’s anniversary programming includes its first New York performances since 1999. Now led by former principal dancer David McAllister, the company is bringing two new programs of works to its repertory.
The mixed bill, entitled Infinity, includes the latest collaboration with Bangarra Dance Theatre, the prominent indigenous dance company, as well as a sleek 2009 work created for the troupe by the in-demand Wayne McGregor and a retrospective compilation of pas de deux interspersed with video montages.
The weekend program, Graeme Murphy’s 2002 version of Swan Lake, may feature the familiar Tchaikovsky score, but little else about it will resemble any other Swan Lake you’ve seen.
“It seemed like the right time to come back—and with this repertoire that we hadn’t brought to North America but that we’ve taken to a lot of other places,” McAllister said last fall during an interview in an Upper West Side diner.
The upbeat, youthful-looking artistic director, 48, was in town with four leading Australian Ballet dancers who performed Glen Tetley’s Gemini at City Center’s Fall for Dance Festival. That work, often performed by American Ballet Theatre during the 1970s, had been revived for the anniversary season as an example of works created for the Australian company.
The Australian Ballet is truly Australia’s national company, performing regularly in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and other cities. As with many classical troupes, full-length works occupy at least half of the programs, but its mixed bills have been adventurous, and the company has cultivated two resident choreographers: Stanton Welch, now the artistic director of Houston Ballet, and Stephen Baynes.
Both will be represented in Luminous, the anniversary retrospective McAllister has staged for the New York season. Along with excerpts from their ballets, it will incorporate celebrated classical pas de deux from Giselle, Don Quixote and others. “We’re doing a short history of the company in one piece,” McAllister said. “We have a lot of archival material, and I’m working with filmmakers with whom we have a long relationship.”
McGregor is the Royal Ballet’s resident choreographer, whose works have been turning up in many repertories, including that of New York City Ballet. He created Dyad 1929, set to Steve Reich’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Double Sextet, in 2009 when the ballet world was celebrating the centennial of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes as a tribute to the innovative spirit of that legendary enterprise.
The Australian Ballet and Bangarra Dance Theatre have collaborated on four works over the past 15 years, all choreographed by Stephen Page, Bangarra’s artistic director. The combined forces of the two troupes—including all 14 of Bangarra’s dancers—will perform Warumuk—in the dark night, which had its premiere in February.
“It’s the first piece Stephen has done for us where he’s actually drawing from indigenous stories.,” McAllister said. “There’s a whole beautiful series of stories about the night sky—dreaming about what happens during the night.”
David Page, the choreographer’s brother, composed the original orchestral score. (All Australian Ballet performances will feature music performed by the New York City Ballet Orchestra, conducted by music director Nicolette Fraillon.)
Murphy, who created the striking and unusual Swan Lake, is best known here for his decades as director/choreographer for Sydney Dance Company, a contemporary ensemble. But Murphy started out as a classical dancer, spending five years as a member of the Australian Ballet, before veering off in a new direction. Eventually he came full circle and created a Nutcracker for the company in 1992 that has remained in its repertory. His Swan Lake was the first work McAllister commissioned when he became artistic director in 2001.
“I said to the board, ‘Either this will be a big success or I’m going to have the shortest tenure of any artistic director,’” said McAllister. “I knew it was going to be unusual. But I thought the idea was so strong that it would work. It was a big gamble, but it worked.”
This Swan Lake, he asserts “is definitely not Petipa. All of the choreography is new. But it’s all on pointe, and there are still four acts. Graeme worked with the 1877 musical score, so music associated with the “Black Swan’ in Act 3 is now in Act 1. He wanted to make sense of the whole idea of the swans, rather than having this magician who turns a lot of maidens into swans. He wanted the swans to actually be believable.”
According to the synopsis, Odette is a young maiden whom Prince Siegfried marries only to lose him to the Baroness, a rival who combines elements of both Von Rothbart and Odile. The fragile Odette, confined to a sanatorium where she “could only find escape in a frozen dream where swan-like maidens, much like herself, would calm her fevered mind and where, for a brief time, it seemed as if Siegfried loved her alone.” McAllister suggests that “the swans are basically facets of her personality.”
He’s clearly putting this production front and center as his company’s calling card—a distinctly Australian spin on a classic, and a chance for the Australian Ballet to present New York audiences something that is uniquely its own.

Australian Ballet
June 12-13: Infinity, mixed bill; June 15-17, Swan Lake; David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, davidhkochtheater.com/events.html; times vary, $29+.

Two Choreographers Come Together at Joyce

Susan Reiter — Thu, 31 May 2012 18:02:21 +0000

If you’re a freelance choreographer, you go where the work is. For Peter Quanz, that has meant trips to Cuba, Siberia and Hong Kong. Jodie Gates’ choreographic assignments have taken her to Berlin and many U.S. cities, including Washington, D.C., Denver and Philadelphia. Both have found a home base from which to coordinate and balance their travels, and this weekend, both are getting a brief but significant New York showcase for their recent works.
The enterprising Gotham Dance Festival has paired these two choreographers for a Joyce Theater program that gives three different companies a chance to be seen by local audiences. Quanz’s Q Dance is affiliated with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet (RWB), performing programs of his choreography in between seasons by the main company. Q Dance will offer two of his recent works: Luminous, to music by Canadian composer Marjan Mozetich, and In Tandem, to Steve Reich’s Double Sextet. Gates’ half of the program will feature her two most recent works: Embellish, performed by Colorado Ballet, and Delicate Balance, performed by the Philadelphia-based BalletX.
In separate phone interviews, the two choreographers spoke admiringly of each other and the process of planning the program; they look forward to finally meeting at the Joyce this week. Quanz spoke from Winnipeg, his home base since he formed Q Dance in 2010, while Gates was in her office at University of California at Irvine, where she is a professor in the dance department. She also founded and directs the annual Laguna Dance Festival.
Both have been increasingly busy choreographing over the past decade, but most of their work is seen outside of New York. Quanz did create Kaleidoscope for American Ballet Theatre’s 2005 City Center season, and In Tandem was made for the Guggenheim’s Works & Process series in 2009. Gates’ work has been seen here in the repertory of ABT II and Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet.
Quanz, a Canadian in his early thirties, trained at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School, where he began choreographing very early, and danced with Stuttgart Ballet. But he always knew choreography was his passion, and it has been his focus since 2002.
He has made works for such eminent companies as the Kirov Ballet and National Ballet of Cuba, and last year made a full-evening work for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. But with Q Dance, which makes its New York debut with these performances, he has established something special.
“Q dance is basically a lab for me to develop repertory that may or may not enter the RWB repertory,” he explained.
When he graduated from the Winnipeg school in 1999, he didn’t expect the city to become so central to his creative life. But after earlier choreography for the company, he developed an association that led to this unique arrangement, an opportunity to work with up to 25 Winnipeg Ballet dancers and cultivate an ongoing connection, rather than the fly-by-night experiences he has as a guest choreographer.
“Having this really intimate knowledge of this group of people allows me to go into material in a far deeper way than I ever could as a guest,” he said. “I have grown tremendously from this company, from this group of dancers—and I really believe in them.”
In Tandem was made with RWB dancers, and four of the original six will perform it here. Having created it for the intimate, uniquely shaped theater at the Guggenheim, Quanz has since developed and adapted it further. He also staged it for a program of his work by a Siberian company that performed it on the Bolshoi stage.
Quanz’s Luminous, a work for eight dancers made for the Hong Kong Ballet, takes its inspiration from Mozetich’s “very emotional” music and a quote from Michael Onddatje’s The English Patient. “Each dancer has two duets with different partners. I’m trying to show how each partner brings out different qualities of those dancers,” he said.
Gates’ two works showcase contrasting sides of her choreography. A leading dancer with the Joffrey Ballet from 1983 to 1995, she went on to perform with Pennsylvania Ballet and Frankfurt Ballet before leaving the stage in 2004, so her work incorporates many varied influences.
“For BalletX—a wonderful company with well-rounded dancers—I made a very contemporary work for all 10 company members to scores by various contemporary composers,” she said. “The Colorado Ballet piece, for 12 dancers, is more neoclassical: on point and utilizing the ballet idiom. I had never choreographed to Mozart, and I chose selections from a variety of his scores. The ballet is whimsical; I had a wonderful time playing with classicism.”
In these two complimentary recent works, Gates feels she’s found her own choreographic voice. “Yes, I’ve been influenced by many great master dance makers whose works I performed. But I think these works really represent more distinctively who I am.”

Peter Quanz & Jodie Gates
June 2, 8 p.m. & June 3, 2 p.m., Joyce Theater, 175 8th Ave. (at 19th St.), www.joyce.org; $10–$39.

Boylston Lands her ‘Dream Role’ Dancing in ‘Swan Lake’

Susan Reiter — Tue, 22 May 2012 22:14:59 +0000

This is Isabella Boylston’s big bird season. The engaging American Ballet Theatre soloist, who has been injecting a vibrant personality and crisp virtuosity into her roles since joining the company in 2007, is taking on two big new assignments: those iconic ballet birds, the Swan Queen and the Firebird. She makes her debut as Odette/Odile in Swan Lake on June 27 and will dance the title character in Alexei Ratmansky’s eagerly anticipated new version of The Firebird June 13 and 22.
The Idaho native has plenty more to keep her busy: this week, she performs the demanding role of Gamzatti in La Bayadère (a New York debut), and next week reprises her impressively personable and confident performance as the Ballerina in Ratmansky’s Bright Stream, a work brimming with humor and warmth.
Choreographers creating works for ABT have tended to cast Boylston in their premieres; last year she was in the cast of both Christopher Wheeldon’s 13 Diversions (which returns this season) and Ratmansky’s Dumbarton. But having proven herself as a very contemporary ballerina, responsive to a choreographer’s vision, she is gradually taking on the more tried and true roles that are the barometers by which ballerinas are evaluated and compared.
Recently, she was rehearsing the opening scene of Swan Lake’s famous second act, in which Prince Siegfried, weary of the social pressures of castle life, escapes into nature to hunt and encounters Odette, a maiden trapped by an evil sorcerer’s spell. Both Boylston and fellow soloist Daniil Simkin will be making debuts in the ballet, and as they worked under the watchful eye of ballet master Clinton Luckett, all illusion of ease vanished.
There was frequent pausing to gasp for breath between attempts, and intricate parsing of minute details. “I can’t find those arabesques,” Boylston said plaintively at one point. “They’re better than yesterday,” Luckett offered by way of encouragement, adding, “Those are two of the hardest steps in the repertory.”
Shortly after rehearsal, Boylston sat down for an interview in ABT’s conference room, plopping her powder-blue practice tutu on the table. She recalled that when she learned last fall that she’d be dancing Swan Lake, “I was overwhelmed. It’s my dream role. I feel like out of the classical ballets, it’s what I would be most suited to. I think at my core I’m more of a lyrical dancer, but lately I seem to have found more strength in my technique, so I’ve been given a lot of technically challenging roles.”
She has performed the famous third-act bravura pas de deux on its own before, but learning the entire ballet has been a consuming process. She has watched many videos of different versions and interpretations of the ballet.
“Now I’m trying to leave that and just go be Odette. There are still so many sections that I’m really unhappy with, so I have a lot of work. With Swan Lake, there’s a lot of freedom, because there are so many different interpretations.
“It’s amazing when you see a dancer and they’re able to really do the choreography and make it look spontaneous—like it was just created for them. To me, that’s the goal. So many people have done so many ballets so well, but I want to try to make every role that I do my own,” she said.
She has that chance as one of the three ballerinas Ratmansky chose to interpret the title role of his new version of The Firebird. The ballet had, in essence, a February out-of-town tryout in Orange County, Calif., and Ratmansky has continued to develop the production in the intervening months. From the start, Boylston said, he worked equally with all three Firebirds (Natalia Osipova and Misty Copeland also perform the role), allowing each to find her own interpretations.
“He didn’t want to pigeonhole anyone; he seemed to like how different each of us was from the other and wanted to draw out our unique qualities, rather than make us all conform to one idea. The Firebird is a wild exotic creature, really powerful, like a force of nature, as well as mysterious. I really want her variations to be physically and dynamically, and musically, quite brilliant—to have a lot of clarity as well as freedom. In my first performance, it came together in a way it never had in rehearsal. So I was very relieved. But I’m still finding the role—and he’s still developing it.”
Working with Ratmansky, ABT’s artist in residence since 2009, has been particularly challenging and stimulating for Boylston. They developed a positive rapport while he was creating his 2010 Nutcracker for the company. “He seemed to really push me. I feel like Alexei really brought a lot out of me that I hadn’t tapped into before.
“I always feel that when I’m in the studio with him, I really bring my A game. I feel comfortable, but never relaxed. With him, more than anywhere else, I feel I’m really pushing myself and trying my best to produce his vision, because I really believe in it.”
The season promises to showcase many aspects of Boylston’s talent, as she takes the stage in both iconic 19th-century roles and bracingly contemporary ones. “I’m loving all the opportunities that I’m getting and the variety of it,” she said happily. “I feel very lucky not to be pigeonholed into classical or contemporary; they seem to find me suitable for both, so I’m really happy about that. I would feel incomplete doing only one or the other.”

American Ballet Theatre
Through July 7, Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, www.abt.org; times

Company Highlights Choreographers Who Are Less Well Known

Susan Reiter — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:39:03 +0000

Visiting companies coming to town often offer programs featuring what might be termed the usual suspects—works by the same few choreographers tend to appear in many repertories. But one of the youngest local troupes, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, is also one of the most individual in its point of view and repertory choices.
In particular, its artistic director, Benoit-Swan Pouffer, has his finger on the pulse of contemporary European choreography, and regularly invites up-and-comers from the continent to work with the 16 versatile Cedar Lake dancers, who seem to be ready for any stylistic and technical challenge.
The two programs that Cedar Lake is bringing to the Joyce Theater through May 27 feature works by choreographers from Sweden, Canada, France, Israel, Norway and The Netherlands. Except for Angelin Preljocaj’s 1995 Annonciation, which Cedar Lake first performed in 2008, the repertory consists entirely of new works created specifically for the company. Four are New York premieres and one is a world premiere.
Asked whether he intentionally avoids American choreographers, Pouffer (who was born and trained in France before dancing with the Alvin Ailey company for seven years) said, “I try to bring an awareness to a body of work by choreographers who don’t have a chance to come, to create work for another company or to bring their own company to America. Cedar Lake is the vehicle for those choreographers to show their work.”
Speaking at the company’s spacious studios and offices in Chelsea, which also includes a 199-seat theater, Pouffer continued, “Cedar Lake is not just a ‘European’ company. But because I’m European and I have a lot of ties to Europe, it made sense for me to start there.
“For these past seven years I’ve been trying to find choreographers I really feel are relevant—and I wanted to find something that we don’t see so much in the States. I felt it was important to bring these choreographers to work with the Cedar Lake dancers. Now if I can find an American choreographer—a New York choreographer—I’m very open.”
His focus is on making a serious commitment to choreographers, giving each an unusually generous eight or nine weeks to create a work. In most cases, he will first invite a choreographer to restage—or adapt—an earlier piece, then, once the dancers have a certain familiarity with their style and approach, have them create a premiere.
That has been the case with most of the choreographers whose new works will be seen at the Joyce. Alexander Ekman, Crystal Pite, Hofesh Schechter and Jo Strømgren have all worked with Cedar Lake at least once already.
In making his choices, Pouffer explained, he considers the existing repertory, then looks for “what will complement or contrast the work. It’s very important to see what I already have, so I can build a program. I contact a choreographer maybe two years in advance, and we start talking about the needs of the company. I also send them tapes of the current repertoire, so they have an idea of what they’re going to be with.
“I don’t give them an assignment; it’s more a conversation between them and me to see where they are artistically and what they want to create. I try to be really aware of their work—point out what I like and why, why it will help our company to have a piece that brings this type of energy.”
The Oslo-based Strømgren, whose Necessity, Again will have its world premiere on next week’s program, first worked with Cedar Lake in 2007. “What I like about Jo is his sense of theatricality. He has a sense of dry humor that I love,” Pouffer said.
“He’s a theater director as well as a choreographer; he has his own theater company, which is very influenced by movement. Because we, as a group, had such a good experience with his first piece, I felt it made sense to invite him again,” he continued.
Cedar Lake’s dancers are employed 48 weeks a year, and the company tours 15 weeks a year. Pouffer looks for dancers who are “eclectic and open”; for the women “it is a requirement that they have a true understanding of pointe technique.” This season’s rep includes one work, by Dutch choreographer (and Cedar Lake first-timer) Regina van Berkel, in which the women dance in pointe shoes. (In others, they may be barefoot or in socks.)
This is Cedar Lake’s third Joyce season in under three years, so they’re clearly establishing a regular local presence, even while keeping busy all over; they have an ongoing residency in Los Angeles and upcoming performances at the Spoleto and Montpelier Festivals. Still, there was intense expectancy as the company runs prepared for the Joyce. “A New York season means a lot—it’s home. The dancers are so excited. They always say they want to perform more in New York.”

Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet
May 15–27, Joyce Theater, 175 8th Ave. (at 19th St.), www.joyce.org; $10+.

Company Highlights Choreographers Who Are Less Well Known

Susan Reiter — Tue, 15 May 2012 21:21:19 +0000

Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet
May 15–27, Joyce Theater, 175 8th Ave. (at 19th St.), www.joyce.org; $10+.

On 150th Birthday, Loïe Fuller Comes Back to Life

Susan Reiter — Thu, 10 May 2012 16:27:13 +0000

The images of Loïe Fuller—her swirls of fabric illuminated by multicolored lighting—have resonated for over a century. This independent, innovative, fiercely curious and self-educated woman first hit the stage as a child actress. But she developed her own unique—and powerfully influential—brand of dance, inventing something that fit no existing categories, at a time before “modern dance” per se even existed.

She created billowing, layered silk costumes, incorporating wands that greatly extended the reach of arms. Her dances were marked by spiraling, improvisational and distinctively personal movement.

Jody Sperling became captivated by Fuller’s work and legacy 15 years ago, almost in spite of herself. A dancer, researcher and writer, she was more at home with Contact Improvisation and release techniques than with the turn-of-the-century innovative routines that made Fuller such a star in Paris.

Invited to perform a re-creation of Fuller’s Butterfly Dance in a Library of Congress centennial event looking back on dance of 100 years earlier, Sperling was fascinated by both the woman and her creations.

“I was a modern dancer; I didn’t have any strong connection to that period,” Sperling said by phone last week. “The experience of putting on great big wings gave me an aesthetic thrill that I hadn’t yet experienced. It made me want to continue connecting into the space that way—expanding my reach, literally.”

Fuller was a multimedia artist well before such a concept existed. She developed her own innovative lighting techniques and held patents on chemical compounds used in her luminescent lamps. She was influential on the fields of lighting design and cinema. Paris welcomed and celebrated her; Toulouse-Lautrec painted her, and Marie and Pierre Curie were among her friends. She was a pivotal figure of the Parisian arts scene from the 1890s through the 1920s, and while she made frequent American tours, she left her native country behind.

Sperling has created a repertory—initially solos, then works for her company, Time Lapse Dance—inspired by Fuller’s innovations, paying homage to the originals but also exploring their possibilities in a present-day context.

“I’ve taken this genre and twisted it in my own direction, tried to apply contemporary choreographic techniques, and new music,” she said. “So we’re making work that is relevant today. But I think that part of what makes it exciting are the repercussions, or the memory, of the past.”

She has written and lectured extensively on Fuller, and her company has performed everywhere from Edinburgh to—just last month—Bahrain.

Time Lapse Dance’s program this week celebrates the 150th anniversary of Fuller’s birth. It ranges from Roman Sketches, the first group work Sperling created in Fuller’s style, to a new work incorporating portions of Fuller’s memoirs.

“Given the fact that it’s Loïe’s 150th, I was interested in doing something a little more personal in way of tribute, that might take some of her writings as a thesis,” Sperling said. “Was there a way that we could unpack something that’s behind the scenes, and expose the process a little bit for the audience? It envisions scenes from her memoirs—in particular her process of discovery of the dance and the costume. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time—to go in a more theatrical and narrative direction.”

Also on the program is Turbulence, set to a propulsive percussion commissioned score by Quentin Chiappetta and receiving its first fully illuminated New York performances. Here, Sperling pushes Fuller’s genre into a more contemporary context, incorporating “a few things that have really been interesting me for a long time. One is to explore rhythm, and use some of the sharper and edgier movement within the genre—to have accents and punctuation and a wider range of dynamics and movements than in some of the more lyrical or period-influenced pieces. I’m interested in exposing energetic forces that are around us at all times, that we’re not always tuned into. When we work with and without the capes, what you can see is the residue of the energy, and not just the shape of the fabric.”

Moving with the extended wands and expansive silk costumes creates specific demands and limitations. “It’s very important to mobilize from the spine and to emanate outwards from there—so that the movement isn’t just the arms waving around, but it’s actually a very full three-dimensional spiral coming from the inside,” Sperling said. “Also, you need to have a deep connection to the floor, and a deep plié, so that you can have the full range, the fluidity up and down, the moving through space.

“Fuller didn’t have the benefit of having studied a dance technique; she just made it up, and improvised a vocabulary. I don’t shy away from taking the genre she created, and basically trying to underlay it with an expanded movement vocabulary, and try to really get it to dance, in a big and active way—in a way that she, or anybody at that time, would not have been capable of. I haven’t gotten bored yet. I feel like there are an incredible number of possibilities for the style, and things you can do with it.”

Loïe Fuller Celebration Season

May 10-13, Joyce SoHo, 155 Mercer St. (betw. Houston & Prince Sts.), www.joyce.org; times vary, $20. Further details: www.timelapsedance.com/Loie_Fuller_Celebration

Choreographer Becomes Dancer Again After 10-Year Absence

Susan Reiter — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:18:20 +0000

Gideon Obaraznek performing in Faker. Photo by Heidrun Lohr.

Gideon Obarzanek is not one to get locked into patterns and avoid change. Just the contrary—the Australian choreographer, whose Melbourne-based company Chunky Move has been a frequent visitor to New York’s major dance stages over the past decade, is in the midst of an eventful year marked by change.
At the end of June, he is handing over the reins of the 17-year-old troupe to Dutch choreographer Anouk van Dijk and has plans for a collaboration with Sydney Theater Company. In February, he created his first work for the venerable Australian Ballet, in essence coming full circle, since he received his early training at that company’s school.
And now, in his mid-40s, Obarzanek is appearing on a New York stage for the first time in a Chunky Move production. The company has brought six of his works to the city since 2001, but he has always been behind the scenes. In fact, he hadn’t danced on a stage for over a decade when he conceived and prepared Faker, the unusual, witty, somewhat self-exposing solo he has brought to Joyce SoHo for two weeks.
“I felt that over the years, I had become very distant from what initially interested me in dance,” Obarzanek said last week in the Joyce SoHo conference area. He had arrived in town following Chunky Move’s month-long U.S. tour of his work Connected, seen at The Joyce Theater last November.
“I was doing very little dancing and I was doing more administrating. I’d lost touch with what my dancers go through being on stage. I wanted to try to find something to do; I didn’t realize it was going to be a big, revealing solo!” he said.
A few years ago, a young professional dancer who admired Obarzanek’s work requested that he create a solo for her. After several delays—“I was busy; she had to apply for funding”—he found time to work with her during a sabbatical he took in 2009.
“I felt burnt out and took six months off. I was at a residency in France, and I was dancing every morning, just to warm up. I really enjoyed it,” he said. “So I had two weeks to work with her.
“It was an odd experience for me, in hindsight, because I’m always the one who comes up with some fragments or ideas and then I pursue people and things to develop that into a work. This project wasn’t initiated in that way. She commissioned me; I came and was clueless. I tried all these things and I felt like a total sham. I was going home and saying, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’
“It was kind of interesting, but we really came up with nothing. I couldn’t find a good idea, a good reason to do it. I tried, but felt I was going through the motions,” he said.
The requested solo may not have materialized, but his frustrating experience in the studio led to the creation of Faker, which had its premiere in September 2010. “After a while, I decided I would make a work about this experience; about trust and about expectations from both sides, a choreographer and a dancer—what we hope for and what we expect. And certainly about disappointment.”
He opens Faker sitting in front of a laptop, reading what may (or may not) be actual emails he received from the dancer who had requested the solo. Rising from the table, he explores movements in a series of sometimes awkward and ungainly solos—one as he listens to a randomly selected pop song on his iPod, singing and strutting along; another, much more contained, and introspective, to a Gesualdo madrigal.
Handsome in that rugged Australian way, and clearly in prime physical shape, Obarzanek had plenty of performing experiences in his memory bank, having danced with Queensland Ballet and Sydney Dance Company before he started creating his own works. But he now bears the responsibilities of directing a busy, thriving troupe, which since 1997 has received a substantial annual subsidy from the State of Victoria.
Yet his return to the stage caught him unprepared on some levels. “I’m not sure if I’m really comfortable with it. Every time I finish up a run of this piece, I think, oh, I’m not sure about this—then I’m invited to do it and my ego gets the better of me!”
He’s pleased that Joyce SoHo is smaller than the spaces where he performed Faker in Sydney and Melbourne. “It’s designed for a very intimate space. The audience is very much exposed, aware of themselves and of me. It’s one of those works that only comes to life with an audience. I’ve set this series of challenges for myself based on tasks that I did in the studio with that dancer. What’s scary about this solo is that it’s very hard to be in control of it.”

Faker
Apr. 26-29 & May 2-6, Joyce SoHo, 155 Mercer St. (betw. Houston & Prince Sts.), www.joyce.org; times vary, $22.

That’s a TAKE

admin — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 22:38:00 +0000

Nichole Canuso Dance Company comes to 3LD

By Susan Reiter

Philadelphia has an active dance scene, but companies and artists from that nearby city rarely show their work in New York. One of its busier dancer-choreographers, Nichole Canuso, is coming to town this week with an installation piece entitled TAKES. In this hour-long work, Canuso and Dito Van Reigersberg’s movement activity within a large translucent cube are filmed by three cameras and projected on the walls of the structure.

Canuso’s bio says that her eight-year-old company “focuses on developing fully investigated and legible hybrid dance projects. These works exist at the crossroads of movement, visual art and theater.” TAKES, which had its premiere in September 2010, is certainly representative of that focus. Canuso collaborated with Pablo N. Molina to create the software design for the piece while Lars Jan is responsible for the installation design; he edits and mixes the projected images live for each performance.

Speaking recently by phone from Philadelphia, Canuso explained the title, which refers to the idea of film takes.“[It] suggests iterations of the same moment; one gets chosen, the rest fall away.” She described the piece as a “snapshot of two people’s lives over time.”

Her own movements in TAKES have a wild looseness verging on gawkiness; Van Reigersberg is more contained. Their projected images at times dwarf them, other times creating a dense layering of overlaps and confrontations.

“Everything you see is a live feed,” Canuso explained. “There are three cameras in the space. We’re doing the editing by where we place our bodies in space. We’re choreographing for the live audience and the cameras at the same time. In some spots, we’re in view of all three cameras. We’ve memorized the map of that. It now feels second nature.

“It was a fantastic challenge, especially as a dancer/choreographer, considering both perspectives—being aware that the detail that a camera can pick up needed to be balanced with the energy an audience needed. This installation forces you to think about macro and micro perspective at the same time.”

The audience is encouraged to view the work from various perspectives, since “each wall shows different images and the piece looks different from up close and far away. Everybody has a different way of watching, we’ve found,” she said. At 3LD, chairs will be placed around the space and people can switch locations as often as they like.

Michael Kiley is the sound designer/composer for TAKES. Some of the musical selections represent what the performing couple play on the record player within their space, which includes a chair, but little else. Canuso describes the score as “a mix of sounds that captures everyday life. The record player in the couple’s space is a big part of their relationship. Choosing the albums we play was tricky, since they come with connotations. It’s important that the sound comes from within the space.”

TAKES actually has two components. During gallery hours on Saturday, people are invited to enter the projection cube to create their own dance within the installation. “Being on the inside is an amazing experience,” Canuso observes. “During gallery hours, people become the characters and we give prompts.”

Takes. Jan. 5–8, 3LD Arts and Technology Center, 80 Greenwich St. (at Rector St.), 866-811-4111; $10.