Eiko & Koma Community Events!

Summer Stages Dance is thrilled to announce two exciting community events with 2008 artists Eiko & Koma. The first of the two events will be a Media Talk with Eiko & Koma at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, on Monday, July 14th, at 6pm. The artists will present excerpts from their art video repertory and discuss the history of their collaboration. Summer Stages will also extend the opportunity for community participation in Eiko & Koma's unique Delicious Movement Workshop, in which participants will explore compositional and performance techniques, while incorporating Eiko & Koma's movement vocabulary. The workshop will take place on Tuesday, July 15th, at 11am, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.

Both events are open to the community and free-of-charge. To reserve space, please email summerstagesdance@concordacademy.org or call 978.402.2339. Visit http://summerstagesdance.org/performances/meet.html for more info.

dance all day!

On Saturday, January 19, Summer Stages Dance and the Concord Academy Dance program sponsored DANCE ALL DAY, a community event open to the public during which the many who participated danced the day away with classes in Tango, Salsa, Hip Hop and Break Dance. The workshops were led by the esteemed Latin and Ballroom dance Studio 665, Concord Academy dance faculty, and the renowned Boston dance group the Floor Lords.

Save The Date!

March 30, 2008
for the much-anticipated Summer Stages Gala Celebration

Summer Stages Dance Joins Hands with the Baryshnikov Arts Center

On Saturday October 6, fifty friends of Summer Stages gathered in NYC to celebrate the inaugural showing of an exciting new partnership between Summer Stages and the Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC). Chris Elam, the first recipient of the Summer Stages Dance/Baryshnikov Arts Center Artist Residency Project, performed works-in-progress that were created during a six week residency that began at Summer Stages in July and August, and culminated in September and October at the BAC. The completed works Too Late Tulip, Rock.Paper.Flock., and Zipper will premiere in NYC in March. [Photo caption: Following Misnomer's performance on the evening of 10/6, Richard Colton and Mikko Nissinen, Artistic Director of Boston Ballet,congratulate Chris Elam]

(iseea) Stephan Koplowitz Friday July 20, 2007

(Photo credit: Jaye R. Phillips)

We are about to finish our second week of rehearsals/research at the ICA. It's been a long week, a true "hump" week in the sense of me having to finish a new section almost every other day, sometimes juggling two sections at once. I'm happy to report that after today's rehearsal (Friday), I've managed to get a "first draft" of the first seven sections.
 
It feels good to have gotten this far. My mostly Boston based company of dancers are really fantastic to work with, totally present and committed and everyone seems to have a healthy sense of humor which makes our time much more pleasant.

We are at the point in the process where all the creative "departments" are in full swing. Justin Samaha is burning the candle at both ends creating the sound/music score, Laura Coulter is getting ready for our Sunday costume "test" run and I am working on finishing the eighth section which is also the only section with more than 12 dancers (it will most likely have 22).

Today, I got through a first draft of the seventh section on the grand stand (sort of look like stairs), it was slow going for awhile. I didn't want to repeat anything I had done in a previous work on grand staircases, Grand Step Project, so I made a rule that I couldn't have the dancers stand up and walk up or down the steps in any way...I want to use the grand stand as a two dimensional space, a more horizontal space. For the most part, I've managed to stick to the rule, except for the part where I have the dancers jumping. No one takes a step, they are simply jumping down or up, nary a step taken. This is a rather light hearted section, the jumps are fun to watch.
 

I also made a rather radical change to the last section in terms of where it will be seen by the audience. Originally, I had the audience standing at the very far end of the back area, in front of the cafe. Now, I have the audience sitting in the grand stand area looking out to the water and down towards the railing and the dancers. I am very happy with this change. It started when I had some of the dancers watch some of the material being made for the final section. Ruth Bronwen who was on the grand stand working with me on section seven, said rather vehemently, "the material looks so much better from the front, on the stands". At first I dismissed this comment, simply because I thought, "well, I'll make it look better from that vantage point...blah, blah, blah..." But later, I had the dancers do the material again and I watched it from the front, sitting up in the stands and yes, it WAS truly, MUCH better, so much so, that I realized there were other benefits. The audience will get to SIT DOWN at the very end of the performance, not something to gloss over. In addition, it gives the audience a wonderful view of the water, a view the architects exploit to great effect in the media room found inside the museum, the room that faces down into the bay (truly memorable). Anyway...I am glad Ruth spoke up, thank you!

Today, a nice photographer from the Boston Globe came to take some photos. At the end of the session, he wanted to take a "portrait" of me...and he asked to take a photo with several of the dancers positioned around me. I reluctantly agreed and the photos taken showed me in the middle of a sea of body parts...I'm not sure how I feel about it...I worry that it may come across that I'm surrounded by live "mannequins", not something I believe in or how I feel about my dancers....I could tell that the image is "eye catching" (we even got to look at it in his camera). It kind of reminded me of a photo one would see on an album/CD cover.....I did ask him to take a more conventional photo of me right afterwards, I have no idea which one they will use....although something tells me, the first one might make it to print

In any event....so much is going to happen in the next seven days, it is an exciting moment in the process when basically "god is in the details...". I'm excited to start putting everything together and see how things fit.

 

 

HEADLONG CO-DIRECTOR AMY SMITH ON THE MAKING OF "SHOSHA"

I have loved the writings of Isaac Bashevis Singer for a long time. When I find a writer I like, I often just read everything they wrote, which I did with Singer when I was in my twenties. He wrote in Yiddish and English, short stories and novels, about life in rural Poland and life in New York City. Being half-Jewish, I always felt a little bit interested in Judaism and the struggle with Judaism depicted in Singer's books. But Singer was first and foremost a humanist, which is how I most strongly connected with him. Of all his books, "Shosha" stuck with me over the years. For one thing, I always pictured David (Brick, Co-Director of Headlong Dance Theater) playing Ari -- there is something about David's stage personality that is both sympathetically laughable and tragic the way Ari is in the book. And I always pictured Nichole (Cousineau, Company Member) as Shosha. Nichole'sexpressive face and "holy fool" clown character are perfectly suited to Shosha, who is childlike, and even mildly retarded in the book, though more spiritually connected than the others.

After a few years of talking about it, I got Andrew and David on board to think about how we would make the piece. First of all, everyone in the cast read the book, and we worked with Mark Lord as dramaturg to help us think about the framing of the piece and collect relevant images, text, and video. "Shosha" was written in the 1970s and takes place in the 1930's as World War II is engulfing Warsaw. Its original title was "Soul Expedition", which refers to the communal meditation on free-will free-love experiments undertaken in the fantasies of Ari's circle of intellectual friends. We tend to think of the 1970s as the time when people broke free from oppressive societal norms in favor of libertarian ideals, multiple sex partners, feminism. But the 1930s in Warsaw was also a time of such experimentation, at least according to Singer. The character of Ari
represents the struggle between tradition and modernity, and the uprootedness that can come from sudden freedoms.

It wasn't long into the process that we realized that the group that puts on the dance play of "Shosha" needed to be characters other than our contemporary selves. Mark turned me on to the diaries of Judith Malina, who with Julian Beck started The Living Theater in the 1970s, and we watched videos of their work and the work of Peter Brook. In many ways, the experimental theater groups of the 70s were Headlong's philosophical and artistic predecessors (of course, the Judson Church movement was also hugely significant for us). So we started playing with the idea of setting the piece in the 70s and having Andrew (Simonet, Co-Director of Headlong Dance Theater) play the Director of this group, which is trying to put on the play-within-the-play of "Shosha". We watched videos and did theater exercises to get into "character" for these characters, at the same time developing the movement material for the "Shosha" sections, which more or less tell the story of the novel in a series of wordless scenes.

Another aspect of the piece that felt especially relevant to us was the "personal as political." In our contemporary time, there's a lot of struggle about how to be a moral person, a good person. If life isn't about he acquisition of wealth, or the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment, what is it about? Without religion to guide us, how do we make choices? In Headlong and in our community of friends in Philadelphia, we think about these questions a lot. And our opposition to the the war in Iraq feels relevant to the 1970s characters we play, who were meaning-seekers and political activists, and opposed the war in Viet Nam.

So all of these ideas were swirling around our artistic process, and all of these ideas are part of "Shosha". Singer's book was really a jumping off point for a series of characters, scenes, and visual pictures. I was reading an article in this week's New Yorker and a quote by Peter Brook really stood out for me -- it reminds me of "Shosha", and I hope a lot of Headlong's work: "A play in performance is a series of impressions; little dabs, one after another, fragments of information or feeling in a sequence which stir the audience's perceptions." I hope this piece induces that stirring.

Amy Smith
Co-Director
Headlong Dance Theater
July, 2008

The Making of a Dance: A Dancer's Perspective Part 2

Rain and Railings
By Karen Krolak, Monkeyhouse Artistic Direcctor (photo credit: Jaye R. Phillips)

Rain may have botched up my commute downtown today but it did not interfere with our rehearsals at the ICA. (However, it should be noted that there is a downside to having a choreographer who knows everyone by name. When traffic makes you tardy to rehearsal, you feel much worse than usual…especially when you discover that today's session started with a polite request for more attention to promptness.)

The cast was divided into two groups to tackle sections 5 and 6 this afternoon. As someone in section 6, I spent the first hour flipping people and trying to figure out how to fly over Marjory Morgan's shoulder. Marjory is one of my favorite Boston choreographers. When Imoved back here a decade ago, I attended a concert that featured her piece about a Spammy Heart. It was clever and irreverent. Watching her sing through her liquid shape-shifting made me yearn for her creative maturity, Many moments from the piece remain indelibly etched into my mind. She and I have never had the chance to work together before and it was thrilling to swap suggestions with her on lifts and movement phrases.

Somehow our group switched from partnering with other people to slithering around the railing at the edge of the ramp on which we were working. We took turns scooching, twirling, and gliding over the banister. It was surprising how everyone encouraged each other. We generated a lot of material just by adding on to one another's ideas. Laughing at our own awkwardness made us more relaxed and helped us to learn faster.

When Stephen took a break from working on section 5, he checked in to see what we'd developed. He quickly teased out the movements that looked too much like tricks, and yet, it didn't feel personal when he pulled apart our phrases and found a few nuggets to focus on. At times his furrowed brow seemed to indicate displeasure at our creations but it became apparent later that I might have misread him.

During a brief break for our group, Jacqui kept jumping up to cling to the side of the stairs behind the railing. "Check it out. Check it out," she would shout. Her intense concentration to keep from falling was charming, especially because it caused her to unconsciously wiggle her tongue back and forth. Looking back at the events of the rest of the afternoon, I suspect that Stephen's forehead was actually a similar sign of clenched concentration. He must have been instinctively editing and splicing our sequences of movements because when he turned his attention back to us, it hardly took him anytime to stitch together the whole section.

So now, there are only two more sections to choreograph.