Moved by movement

WEEK 29

Dance as an art form is a foreign language to me. And I say this despite the joy of moving my body to a groove. Despite years of ballet as a teen. A few modern dance classes as an adult. And let’s not discount learning Latin ballroom when I lived in Melbourne (more a reflection of the Australian obsession with competitive dancing than my love of ChaCha and Rhumba).

But live dance performance has been entirely missing from my life. The desire is there. I’m moderately aware of the most accomplished choreographers, living or past. I clip listings from the Arts section each winter when the renowned companies tour their new works. Yet I always choose something else to do.

No longer. Within five minutes of the curtain rising at the Juilliard New Dances program last Friday, I felt euphoric. My heart full and open, taking in the lush sounds, movement of bodies in space, the minimalist set, warm and flattering lighting. I knew instantly I need and want more of this.

Let me back up. A week earlier, I’d read one of those (often-clipped but ignored) blurbs about a seven-day run of original performances by students of Juilliard Dance. I loved the premise: four well-known choreographers join forces with students at the start of the school year to create four new dances – one for each class year. World premieres for them … and a first for me.

On a blustery night of miserable, relentless rain – where all you want is to be swaddled in cashmere by a fire – Irena and I trekked to Lincoln Center and walked into the Juilliard School. Lincoln Center itself is worthy of accolades and hyperbole – one of the largest performing arts complexes on the planet – with all the biggies in one place: The Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet, New York Philharmonic, and there’s jazz, chamber music, theatre, film and more. All new for me and prime subjects for future 52×52 posts.

Programs in hand, we entered the theatre, effectively a college auditorium, yet with seating for about 1,000 people, great sight lines and phenomenal acoustics and staging, it was anything but amateur.

The evening’s performance was a progression of sorts beginning with the first-year students and ending with the class of 2020. The dance director wrote about the risk-taking required to create a new dance – all elements needing to “come together with perfect synergy” across choreographers, composers, musicians, dancers, even the lighting, costume and production teams. This intense collaboration produced the 360-degree live experience that unfolded on stage.

I know how music is made. I’ve watched painters paint and sculptors sculpt. We’ve all taken photographs and written sentences. But what goes into making dance? Choreography is mystifying. Is movement first or music first? How does the mind see bodies of all different shapes and sizes moving in space? And what about space itself – both the empty spaces between bodies and the space where dancers touch? When does fabric and lighting enter the composition, or the effects of shadows as forms move? For me, this interplay of elements in all four dimensions, live and ephemeral, was magical.

The class of 2023 opened with a piece called Sight & Sound, which turned out to be the most athletic of the four dances, set to a score adapted from Detroit techno producer Carl Craig and recording artist Kevin Saunderson, featuring live piano and a performance by DJ Virus J. The dancers’ black leggings and fitted tops would have been right at home sweating at Equinox. They danced barefoot, mostly independently, with such soul and energy – and apparent delight – I wished I could hit re-play and see it again.

The second-year students danced a piece called This Great Wilderness by Jamar Roberts (who, as an aside, in the week since the performance was profiled twice by the New York Times as the resident choreographer of Alvin Ailey) – with an original score performed by musicians from Juilliard Jazz. I pinched myself (again) realizing these are kids, probably not even 20-years old, moving their bodies fully, in unreal ways. The same body we all have.

Also present across all the dances was the power of the floor – not something I’d expected given that the ballets I’ve seen are mostly upright, yet also not surprising. For the past couple of years, I’ve been working with a movement specialist who’s a trained dancer and fully aware of biomechanics. She’s a believer in the power of body work using the floor and gravity. It’s an instinctual way to move.

This power came alive in the third piece called Desde, which appeared to be much more technically advanced, visceral in many ways, with dancers climbing on each other, lifting each other at their waists, carrying one another on their shoulders. The set took on an otherworldly glow, the only source of light coming from a circle of yellow bulbs at the rear of the stage. The neutral costumes erased gender, and with the back-lighting, the diverse bodies were just that, bodies in motion.

For me, the most meaningful aspect of the evening was the absence of speech, a salve after an intense work week where everyone talked at all times, at each other, interrupting, everyone vying to be heard. Our lives are dominated by spoken words, and it’s exhausting. Oddly, although there was music and sound, my memory of the evening is of silence.

My other memory is feeling love from the stage. I imagined an intimacy that comes from learning and growing together, in small cohorts of 20 to 25 students. Add to that the physicality of dance, one’s body changing and transforming, and an overwhelming artistic impulse that overshadows all else. What it must feel like to be moved to create something so beautiful.