Movement in the Moment came into being in the early years of the Bates Dance Festiva (now in its 34^th season.) Since it’s founding, contact improvisation has been an integral part of the Festival. BDF Director Laura Faure remembers the showing gradually developing from humble beginnings as an in-house jam into the public event that it is today.

Youth Arts Program campers and counselors

Yet despite a larger audience, the event remains highly informal and free to the public, encouraging members of the local Maine community to attend. For the past number of years the evening has included a pre-show performance by campers in the Youth Arts Program, Bates Dance Festival’s community outreach program that brings local campers aged 6-17 together to explore art of all kind. On Wednesday, half an hour before the show began, Youth Arts Program families, BDF students, and general audience members gathered outside on Bates College’s idyllic campus. The roughly fifty campers stood in a clump on the end of a stone path cutting through a grassy field across from Youth Arts Program musicians Terrence Karn and Rob Flax, their instruments in hand. Guided by their counselors and staff the young students began their improvisational score. Every time a certain whistle was sounded, they all froze. The score focused on mimicry, including a mirroring activity done in pairs, and a walking game where the campers exaggerated the movements of one student. The campers concentrated fiercely on the tasks at hand, foreshadowing the show to come.

As they entered the Bates College Alumni Gymnasium audience members were approached by the dancers and asked to leave their shoes in a taped out region of the floor adjacent to the marley, and take a seat in the bleachers on either side of the dance floor. The fifteen dancers included many members of the Festival’s faculty along with select staff and community members. Festival lighting designer Greg Catellier sat ready at his board next to the eight world-class festival musicians, poised in a sea of instruments. Lighting and music allowed the evening to function as a fully improvised show as opposed to a jam – all of the converging aspects of theatricality executed simultaneously by practitioners at the very top of their game. Faculty members and practiced improvisers Angie Hauser and Chris Aiken introduced the evening. “The movement you’re about to see doesn’t exist,” said Aiken, and the show began.

Autumn Eckman and Robbie Cook

A complex four page long score was posted around the room for the dancers and musicians to reference, encouraging contrast in both movement and music. Taking note from the Youth Arts Program dancers, mimicry played an interesting role throughout the evening. A particularly poignant recurring moment came when one dancer would raise their arm and others would slowly follow either in a clump around the leader or scattered around the stage. This simple gesture felt powerful both in juxtaposition to the otherwise near constant individual movement and in the coming together of the dancers almost in protest or solidarity, particularly moving in light of the country’s polarizing climate this summer.

Paul Matteson and Michel Kouakou

At one point BDF faculty member and former Bill T. Jones dancer Paul Matteson left the floor and walked over to an usher leaning against the doorframe on the far edge, arms crossed. Matteson stood closely next to him and took on his stance, provoking laughter from the audience members who’d watched him walk away. Moments like this pushed against the boundaries of the metaphorical fourth wall erected even in such an informal setting.

As a group ran past BDF jazz teacher Autumn Eckman’s head was lightly knocked by another dancer; instead of reacting against the interruption she let it lead her into new movement. This shows the necessity of improvisational skills for all dancers – anything can happen in performance, and the ability to think on your feet and take cues from others is crucial. This show provided an important opportunity for dancers of all generations in the audience to be reminded of this aspect of their training.

Midway into the show the dancers unrolled tech tape on the floor, creating a smaller square and pulled rows of audience members onto each of the four sides to create a more intimate boundary line. The dancers casually inserted themselves into the audience, reentering the performance one at a time. The first out was veteran faculty member Andrea Olsen. Olsen performed a largely gestural solo, finding stillness in balance and falling gently off of it to lyrical piano music. She was joined in sequence by Angie Hauser and Doug Varone dancer Xan Burley. These three unique dancers spanning multiple generations moved individually but in reference to each other, their personal styles speaking clearly in complement to one another.

Angie Hauser

Moving in the Moment ended with the dancers moving one at a time into the neighboring collection of shoes. They found their way to standing and helped each new arrival into the fray. Once the last dancer arrived, they all stood still, staring ahead for a number of seconds before the lights went dark. The show was a reminder of the importance of creativity, concentration, collaboration, and also of finding playfulness and joy in dance. These are key tenets of the Bates Dance Festival, and the evening as a whole spoke to the uniqueness of this historic summer community.

This post was written by Chava Lansky.  Chava is the BDF Social Media Intern for the 2016 summer.

Photography by BDF Intern Blake Capel. 

The event opened with introductions by BDF Director Laura Faure. Faure stressed that the evening was the first collaboration between these two Maine art organizations since 2000. Next Michel Droge led the audience through a slide show of her work, describing her research process. Each collection of paintings stems from a different inspiration: her Requiem series was built on the “liminal spaces” of sunset and sundown she witnessed while walking the coast of Maine. The collection Tiny Catastrophes came from climate change and the aurora borealis. Droge’s influences extend beyond nature to Greek philosophy, poetry, and more.

Requiem #1 by Michel Droge

Next Varone joined Droge, and reminded the audience how hard it is for artists to talk about their work. He spoke of dance as an abstract form, and said that he too feels like a painter, using bodies architecturally to tell a story. Yet he differs from Droge and other visual artists in that his art form constantly regenerates itself. He spoke about the contrast of dances in his canon as painting with different palates and colors. Like Droge, Varone went through examples of his work and spoke on the many influences that spark his creation. He showed clips of two pieces, Carrugi (2012) and Rise (1993), and what influenced them: fiction, music, etc. Next he moved onto ReComposed, a work that premiered last summer at the American Dance Festival, which he’ll present here at BDF this coming weekend. ReComposed, Varone explained, differs from his other works in that it’s a piece of art based on another artist’s work – Joan Mitchell’s complex and abstract pastels. In many of the works parts are smudged out; Varone explained that once Mitchell was diagnosed with cancer she slowly erased parts of her drawings to reflect her own life.

To create ReComposed Varone and his dancers looked at sections of their favorite pastels and created written phrases from which they made movements. On Friday Varone was joined by two of his dancers, Xan Burley and Alex Springer. Burley and Springer demonstrated this process. Varone read some of the phrases they’d created: “chronicle, sanctuary, allude most bare, defiant yet lyrical, holding attention, edges unfinished, awkward and open, interior weather, unruly precision, etc,” while Burley and Springer enacted the gestures in movement. Next Varone placed them close together, so they were forced to weave in and out, improvising partnering as they danced. Next, the spirit of community and collaboration shone in earnest: Varone invited the audience to make a dance.

Varone called on a number of audience members at random to pick their favorite part of a Mitchell pastel. Each participant saw something different: two yellow lines that look like French fries, seagulls, Winston Churchill, a needle. Varone summarized what each person said into a concise phrase, and both Burley and Springer turned it into a movement until the two dancers had accumulated a rough minute long duet created through improvisation. Burley and Springer moved in a full and liquid way; they express perfectly Varone’s signature juxtaposition of looseness and control.

The pastel created by audience members.

For the next step of the project, Droge and her assistant taped a huge piece of white paper to the floor. Five volunteers chose pastels from a box, and then they were instructed to draw what they saw while Burley and Springer went through their duet. A second group was called up to add to the drawing. At this point, they’d created a pastel based on a dance based on a pastel. And it wasn’t over yet.

Varone and Droge held up this new drawing for the audience to see then taped it back to the floor. Lastly, Varone asked his dancers to improvise for one full minute based on what they saw in the drawing, and then to do the same for five seconds. At this point, as Varone said, the process had come full circle: pastel to dance to pastel to dance.

The Inspiration of Abstraction gave audience members a deeper understanding of the split second, impulse decisions that turn into art. Varone closed by saying that his dances are never done; that the ephemerality of dance is both what he loves and hates the most.

This is just the beginning of Varone’s residency at BDF. This summer marks his tenth at the Festival. See Doug Varone and Dancers perform ReComposed and two other works this Friday and Saturday at the Schaeffer Theatre.

This post was written by Chava Lansky.  Chava is the BDF Social Media Intern for the 2016 summer.

For many audience members, the show began before they even arrived. Half an hour before curtain, choreographer Heidi Henderson and her company member Christina Jane Robson performed nowhere going quietly on a lawn next door to the theater, foreshadowing much of the movement that would be seen in Henderson’s piece Leslie later in the show. Impervious to the chilly, damp weather, the dancers held long balances and gestural, shape based movements. The piece was the perfect next step in a long history of site-specific work at the Festival, and whet audience members appetites for the proscenium show to come.

Long time BDF community member and current Young Dancers Workshop repertory teacher Danté Brown opened Joe’s Babel with his back to us, arms flapping furiously, rocking from front to back foot, his body cloaked in a dark hooded sweatshirt. Dancing to a steady percussive beat, Brown dove into turns and slides on the floor with a weighted-ness, as if his upper body yearned to take off while his legs acted as stubborn roots. As the energy of the dancing wound down Brown painstakingly crawled on hands and knees to a microphone stand on the other side of the stage. Using it like a rope he pulled himself to standing. The music faded out as he scanned the audience, seemingly on the verge of speaking. Softly, all he uttered was “hello” before the stage went black. In a Q+A session following the show, Brown spoke about the piece as an externalization of his introversion, evident in his struggle to bring himself to speak.

Next came BDF emerging choreographer Ali Kenner-Brodsky performing an excerpt called parT III of the longer work parT she’s been working on during her residency at the Festival. The curtain opened on a set stage: three café tables with accompanying chairs, Kenner-Brodsky seated at one while her dancer Meghan Carmichael stands on the opposite side of the stage, bobbing her head in an up and down “no” motion while taking in her surroundings. Though a duet, the two dancers never truly interact with each other – Carmichael looks at Kenner-Brodsky, but she never looks back. Their dance reads like a conversation; as one dancer starts moving, the other pauses, her movement shrinking. A soundscape by composer MorganEve Swain creates an atmosphere of domesticity: kettles hissing on the stove, children (Kenner-Brodsky’s own) playing in the snow, humming, and more.

Moving away from the category of modern dance came Shakia Johnson’s Playing Games. The Young Dancers Workshop hip-hop faculty member, Johnson’s solo was playful, performed to a series of excerpts of songs interspersed by a recorded voice telling her to quiet down, giving the illusion of being let into Johnson’s late-night private dance party. Johnson gestured to the audience to interact by clapping and stomping, engaging them in an exciting contrast to the rest of the performance.

Jane Weiner’s Called Back featured members of her company Hope Stone Dance including Courtney D. Jones, jazz faculty member at the Young Dancers Workshop. The trio opened with the dancers standing in high heels and long tan trench coats with glittery wings on the backs under a large black umbrella, holding an old-fashioned leather suitcase. Dancer Candace Rattliff Tompkins was the first to take off, stepping out of her shoes to leap and run through space. She rejoins the group with a spool of masking tape, creating a circle on the floor around them – a recurring moment throughout the piece. Called Back moves from The Supremes-style background dancing to huge, technical contemporary movement to complex partnering. At the end of the piece the stage is littered with props: the suitcase lies open, pairs of shoes spilling out and lined up across the stage, umbrellas scattered, and tape circles crowding the stage, the dancers back in their trench coats, standing calmly in the chaos.

The second act featured two pieces very different from each other. The first was Awassa Atrige/Ostrich, choreographed in 1932 by Asadata Dafora and performed by Garfield Lemonius, modern faculty member for the Young Dancers Workshop. The program notes for the piece read, “This groundbreaking solo was one of the first modern dance compositions to fuse African movements with Western staging. A warrior imitates the graceful but powerful movements of the ostrich, King of the Birds.” Lemonius strutted onstage in a skirt of feathers, upper body coated in oil and glistening, his arms articulating from the shoulder, movement rippling through. Regal and strong he fully embodies the historic role. This piece provided an important glimpse into the depths of modern dance history and as a grounding for the more contemporary work shown.

Lastly was Young Dancers’ improvisation teacher Heidi Henderson, back again performing Leslie, a trio danced by herself, Christina Jane Robson, and Tristan Koepke, Associate Director and modern teacher of the Young Dancers Workshop. The piece builds on the movement vocabulary Henderson and Robson set up in the site-specific work that opened the show. Leslie was divided into three sections. In the first, the three dancers sat with their legs stretched in front, moving slowly upstage wearing white socks with their costumes, high-waisted colorful pants and short sleeve turtleneck tops, introducing the audience to a series of gestures while classical piano music plays. They lay on their backs to slither back down, moving their ribs and knees like inch worms. The second section was in silence, the dancers moving bigger; Koepke and Robson broke off into a duet complete with gentle lifts and weight sharing. In the third section seven dancers dressed similarly in pants and turtlenecks joined the trio in neat rows onstage as a Justin Timberlake played. The group was made up of many of the performers from the show as well as other Festival staff members. The whole group stared passively at the audience, executing a routine in unison with moments of individuality. Henderson writes, “the work is exact without being virtuosic… There is no message.” This sentiment rings true – though this ending to DanceNOW feels on one hand like a funny finale for the talented and diverse cast, it is ultimately more a feat of exactitude and randomness, the perfect postmodern ending for a show spanning the gamut of dance “now.”

This post was written by Chava Lansky.  Chava is the BDF Social Media Intern for the 2016 summer.