October 2, 2008
UW Chamber Dance Company recreates masterpieces in annual concert Oct. 9-12
In 1947, dancer and choreographer Joseph Gifford went to the Museum of Modern Art and saw Pablo Picasso’s iconic painting, Guernica. He was, in his own words, “shocked, blissed out, in awe” after seeing the huge black and white painting depicting the bombing of a small town during the Spanish Civil War.
He was, in fact, so affected that he went into the studio and created a dance called The Pursued.
That dance is one of several important works in modern dance history to be presented in the UW Chamber Dance Company’s annual concert Oct. 9-12 in Meany Hall. And Gifford himself, now 88, came to work with the dancers as they rehearsed The Pursued.
CDC members Catherine Cabeen and Matthew Henley perform the eight-minute work, which consists of a solo for each of them and a duet, all set to flamenco music.
“Dance is so much about relationships, and it starts with that relationship between the choreographer and the dancer,” Cabeen said of their work with Gifford. “So it was a real honor to have him here with us.”
The work with Gifford is typical of what Chamber Dance Company members — professional dancers studying for their MFA — do each year as they carry out their mission of making sure great dance works from the past are kept alive for new generations of dancers. Each of their concerts contains a number of historical works, and there is always at least one special guest invited to, in dance parlance, “set the dance on the company.” When possible, it is the original choreographer.
In this case Gifford, despite his years, did more than tell the dancers what they should be doing. “He demonstrated everything, even the parts where we’re down on the floor,” Henley said.
The Pursued is, in fact, a physically demanding dance. It is full of movement requiring pure strength, such as hinging backward at the knee nearly to the floor. It is also emotionally demanding.
Although the dancers caution that the movement of the dance doesn’t tell a story in the same way that acting would, it is meant to convey something of the devastation of the bombing. Cabeen pictures it this way: “In the solo, I’m experiencing fear — hearing the sounds of the plane — she [the character] is alone so there’s that desperation of reaching out. Then when we’re in the duet, there’s destruction all around us but the partnership is helping us to survive at that moment.”
Henley reports feeling a little sick before performing his part. “It’s because I know in the next eight minutes I’m going to go to a place that’s really hard to go to — putting myself in that world and seeing what I’m supposed to see, knowing where I have to go in order to communicate to the audience what Joseph has asked us to communicate. It’s emotionally draining, and it starts before the piece even starts.”
It was going to that deeply emotional place that Gifford emphasized as he worked with the dancers. He wanted them to have an experience rather than concentrate on the particular steps he’d created. In fact, Cabeen said, there were times when he abandoned what he had originally created in response to the particular dancers he was working with. “He gave us this great opportunity to bring ourselves into the work, which was really special,” she said.
The result is a dance that is starkly simple but at the same time emotionally wrenching. And it’s just one of the dances on the program.
The CDC dancers also will be doing three new reconstructions of work by Loie Fuller. While not a choreographer or dancer in the traditional sense, Fuller created moving images with fabric and light that make her more well known in cinematic and lighting circles than as a modern dancer. To perform her dances, female dancers wear long robes of white silk with arm extensions that help them wave the fabric around them like wings. Lighting completes the picture, turning the costumes a variety of colors.
The usually barefoot dancers don shoes for a dance called Fugue by one of the better known modern choreographers, Twyla Tharp. The 1970 work features three dancers accompanied by the sound of breath and the stomping of feet.
Injecting some humor into the proceedings is Bull, a 1994 work by David Dorfman and Dan Froot. In it, two men wearing tuxedos warily circle each other, slap each other’s faces and speak through bullhorns as they satirize the traditional role of the male dancer as stage prop.
Bringing the concert to a joyous close is Doug Elkins’ Center My Heart. The 1995 work won the Bessie Award, the dance world’s equivalent to the Emmy or the Oscar, and it highlights physicality as the essential human communication that can cross boundaries, language and cultures.
This is the 20th annual concert for the Chamber Dance Company, directed by Dance Professor Hannah Wiley. The CDC dancers, besides Cabeen and Henley, include Louis Gervais, Jamie Hall, Elizabeth Lentz and Tonya Lockyer.
The concert opens Thursday, Oct. 9 and runs through Sunday, Oct. 12. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and at 2 p.m. on Sunday in Meany Hall for the Performing Arts. Tickets are available at the UW Arts ticket office at 206-543-4880 or online at www.meany.org.
