Dance-Makers Who Are Making Waves
A woman in a white petticoat hangs from a meat hook, a guest won't go home, a dancer tries to balance herself against a board, a film reflects live partnering with timing askew, and a screwdriver and hammer shape movement as if it were carpentry. These are just some of the images from six young artists who reflect the new Seattle choreography. They come to dance from varied backgrounds, bringing different interests and emphasis. Their work is individualistic but shares the quality of unexpectedness, and comes out of the place where movement meets thought.
Gaelen Hanson and Dayna Hanson of 33 Fainting Spells
These co-choreographers (not sisters despite their last names) are making a big splash in the local pool. When their evening-long dance-theater duet, "The Uninvited," opened at On the Boards in 1996, and toured to Oregon, Texas and Germany, audiences and critics were enthusiastic. The Frankfurter Rundschau called it ". . . gripping, varied and full of fantasy. Hanson and Hanson create dance that is altogether new."
Dayna Hanson studied fiction at the University of Washington. Gaelen Hanson majored in dance and theater at Oberlin College before getting an advanced degree in dance/performance from the Arnhem Center in the Netherlands.
These backgrounds bring a highly developed sense of theater and storytelling to their work. This sense of dance as theater and story is evident in their choice of a name for their group: 33 is the
number of fainting spells in three Anton Chekhov stories and "33 Fainting Spells" was the title of a play by Russian constructivist director Vsevold Meyerhold (1874-1942).
In "The Uninvited," set to 20th-century music (Maurice Ravel, Anton Webern and Galina Ustvolskaya, among others), an unwelcome visitor is the source of dramatic tension. Although not a word is spoken, the exchange of rapid stomps and steps makes the movement seem conversational.
In their 1997 "Sorrow's Sister," the Hansons, along with dancer Peggy Piacenza, tell the story of three women trying to find joy in the midst of desperate times. Set in World War II Europe, the piece plays out to the music of Bela Bartok, Dmitri Shostakovitch and Kurt Weill.
33 Fainting Spells recently received a $21,000 grant from the National Dance Project for the development and presentation of "Maria the Storm Cloud." Their new work, which Gaelen Hanson describes as an ironic look at romance and longing, will feature live music by cellist Lori Goldston, a onetime Nirvana performer, and pianist Daisy Hasse.
Peggy Piacenza
A relative newcomer to choreography, Piacenza has gotten a lot of attention and one of the two coveted spots for local artists in the 1998 New Performance Series at On the Boards. Her expanded "Sense of Sorts," part of which was first performed at Northwest New Works, will share an evening with KT Niehoff's "Residue."
Piacenza started choreographing when she was 6. She put on annual neighborhood Fourth of July extravaganzas, complete with rehearsals, tickets and programs.
"I was such a bossy little director," she says with a laugh. "And I still am." There was a good dance studio down the street in her hometown of Highwood, Ill., so she was well grounded in ballet, modern and jazz. She studied dance at North Carolina School of the Arts before moving to Seattle and hooking up with the Pat Graney company.
"Sense of Sorts" reveals a completely fresh voice, full of humor and intelligence. Piacenza deconstructs movement, using hammer and screwdriver. First, the dancers take up real tools to shape each other's motions - a shoulder unhinged, a back straightened - then their bodies seem to become tools in themselves, nailing their feet into the floor, ricocheting against each other. The mechanistic mania is offset by a gigantic tree stump lurking serenely in the middle of the stage.
As well as performing in 33 Fainting Spells, Piacenza is a founding member of D-9 Dance Collective.
KT Niehoff
Niehoff came to dance with a BFA in theater history and acting from New York University. She says her work "Residue," which will share the bill with Piacenza's "Sense of Sorts" in the New Performance Series, is "about the impact we have on each other's lives, about the cumulative effect of moving around a space and then leaving, coming back the next day and leaving again, about the marks left behind."
Niehoff started Velocity dance studio with Michelle Miller. As a teacher she is passionate about the step that turns a dancer into an artist.
"I don't know of any choreographers in this town who want the dancers to shape themselves to some computer image of movement. I need to work with dancers who don't wait for me to say, `go here and come there.' The artists I work with (Amii LeGendre, Hassan Christopher, Shane Szabo, George Lugg) take anything I give them and immediately start messing with it. Dancers need to be able to think and give to the material. Because when you're choreographing you're using people and their personalities. It's not like painting with red and blue and green."
Niehoff has collaborated for three years with composer Bob Barrazza. She is trained musically, so she is particularly interested in what she call the "marriage of music and movement, the physicality of music."
In addition to rehearsing and expanding "Residue," Niehoff will be revisiting her 1995 piece "4/4 Culture" for the King County Performance Network tour. "4/4 Culture," her earliest collaboration with Barrazza, is lighthearted and informal, set to band-music rhythms, with lots of stomping, slapping and reeling.
Amii LeGendre
LeGendre is perhaps the most imagistically oriented of the new choreographers, and in that way the most directly connected to Pat Graney's tradition. In "Sit on the Lap," a full-evening work presented at New City Theater in September of 1996, a bride dangled on a harness while another woman stepped in and out of a washbucket, attaching clothespins to her mouth. In addition to startling visual imagery, LeGendre's choreography also has a high level of athleticism, reflecting her early training in gymnastics.
While at Connecticut College, LeGendre majored in dance and religious studies. Her evocative, iconoclastic works echo a deep awareness of the spiritual.
At Bumbershoot, LeGendre will perform "Fractal," a combination of duets and solos about sight and sightlessness. She is currently collaborating on a piece called "Baiting the Blind" with film and performance artist Sandy Cioffi.
Crispin Spaeth
Crispin Spaeth's "Broken Day," which premiered in February as part of the On the Boards New Performance Series, was her third collaboration with Seattle musician Wayne Horvitz. This summer she's in residency at the Bates Dance Festival in Maine. The work she is creating there will eventually be part of a new piece that will have an independent production next summer.
Her process for choreography is to start with the title of a work, which represents a developed idea. "Hand Over Fist," an intricate piece in which a simple board and an old pair of army boots become a highly inventive means of control between the dancers, is about economics and power. "I saw it as an open hand over a closed fist, a gentler way of blocking power," Spaeth says. Spaeth, who majored in visual arts at Oberlin College, with a minor in dance, is oriented to complex patterns of movement in her choreography.
In "Force of Habit," a new work commissioned by Freehold Theater, she will be working with theater director Mark Jenkins in a collaboration between theater and dance. "We're not trying to create a hybrid form, but to work with one kind of vocabulary in another kind of language, and see what happens."
---------------------- Where to see new dance ----------------------
Starting Sept. 6, watch Pat Graney, Crispin Spaeth, KT Niehoff, D-9, Spectrum Dance and others perform throughout King County; 800-677-ARTS.
Check out Bumbershoot's Bagley Wright Theatre:
KT Niehoff and Amii LeGendre performing, 6 p.m. Aug 31 and 6:15 p.m. Sept. 1
Excerpts from Crispin Spaeth's "Broken Day," 4 p.m. Saturday.
Hassan Christopher's solo "Finding Green," 6:45 p.m. Monday.
D-9 Dance Collective's "Hendrix and Holiday," 6:45 p.m. Saturday and 8 p.m. Aug. 31.
Kaleidoscope Dance Company (dancers age 8 to 15), noon Sept. 1.
Wen-Yun Melody Liu's "Rise Through the Sky," 1:30 p.m. Saturday.
Tom Truss' "The Field," 12:30 p.m. Saturday.
Laura Whitman's "Installed," 2:30 p.m. Sept. 1.