FFWD Weekly
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| DANCE Classic Jam: DJD's Box Set When it comes to dance, there are practical reasons why nice, clean, recorded music makes more sense than the messy problem of live music - it's cheaper and logistically easier, and it's just so darn nice and predictable. If predictability isn't your goal, however, you put a band on stage and see what happens. DJD has been doing just that at least once a year for the past decade, and associate artistic director Hannah Stilwell says it's worth the effort. "You're responsive - you're not just putting out," she explains. "You're taking in and putting out both to the musicians and to the audience, and it becomes much more of a real thing.... It becomes way more alive. It also gives you the chance to change your performance every night - the color that you infuse it with will be different depending on how the musician is feeling that day, so suddenly you bring your whole life's experiences with you to the stage... it's exciting as a performer." In honor of the 10 years since the company made its commitment to live music, DJD is presenting what it calls its "box set," a look back at some of the company's most memorable live music shows, in the company of a group of live musicians led by percussionist Jean-Christophe Leroy. Stilwell is acting as artistic director of the work, much of which was choreographed by DJD artistic director Vicki Adams Willis. "My personal goal, in remounting Vicki's work, is to take it and say, 'Here's where it got to before, let's see if we can just instill it to a deeper depth in the cells of every dancer, and see how much more life it has in it and see how much more emotional dimension we can add to it,'" Stilwell says. "Personally, my goal as artistic director of Vicki's work is that she comes and sees her dances taken further than she's ever seen them, and that she enjoys them as much as the people next to her." In its new staging, the diverse work is being reframed as components in a dream. Stilwell has choreographed two new pieces - "Undecided" and "Heat" - that will premiere as part of the retrospective, and the other brand new element will be the poetry of Sheri-D Wilson, who has written several segueways between pieces, set on DJD dancers. "I Want to be James Brown" was written for longtime DJD company member Kimberley Cooper, and "Sarisa's Song" is for Sarisa Figueroa. Cooper says this show isn't the first time she's combined dance and text, but admits to some trepidation. "I've spoken on stage before, so it's not quite as scary this time," she says, "but it was really hard the first time. I'm a dancer - I speak with my body, not my voice... I don't have a voice," she laughs. Figueroa concedes that she might fall victim to nerves, too. "I guess the biggest thing I'm scared of is blanking - right in the middle of my piece, going, 'What's next?'" she says. "As a dancer, you can just sort of improvise, make something up, and exit, if you need to, but for this, I know I'm in the spotlight." The poet responsible for the words says that contrary to their own claims, neither dancer was afraid to experiment with text. Sheri-D Wilson herself has a background in dance, and sees poetry and dance as intimately related. "It seems natural to me, because of the lyricism of dance," she says simply. "I've been working with a jazz company and I write jazz poetry - some of the rhythms are very, very similar. I believe that poetry is in the body - it's not just on the page. I think that poetry lifted off the page and put into the body is alive and exciting, and so I've always done that, and it just so happens that dance companies started asking me to do things." The link with poetry is one area in which DJD is stepping into the future, but Stilwell says that because jazz is so much about being present in the moment and reflecting contemporary social history, it's impossible to say where the company will be in another 10 years. "The world is getting smaller and that's a very obvious thing that has happened in music in the last 10 years," she says. "Jazz has always welcomed lots of influences, but now all that influence is influencing everything. The melange of world music is getting stirred faster and faster. I think that music is headed on a very exciting course and who knows how our dancers' bodies will respond." |
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