Musical movements
U of C's Mainstage show incorporates contemporary dance and string quartet
PREVIEW
MAINSTAGE 2002
University of Calgary Department of Dance
Runs March 21 to 23
University Theatre (U of C)
With the prohibitive cost of hiring musicians, today's dancers too often miss out on the electrifying immediacy of live music. But in an unusual interdisciplinary collaboration, this year’s Mainstage production features the University of Calgary string quartet onstage with seven contemporary dancers. The two groups intertwine in a performance piece called the open window to the wild hill, co-created by dance professor Davida Monk and music professor Allan Gordon Bell.
"It's the first time I’ve ever performed with live musicians," says Dana Loewen, who has studied dance at the University of Calgary for four years.
The piece is one component of the stylistically varied Mainstage event, which also features a jazz dance by Michelle Moss, a neo-classical ballet by Jackie Stewart and contemporary works by Neah Kalcounis and Jason Stroh, all performed by students from the dance program.
In Monk’s experimental piece, the four string players aren't merely positioned on the stage as accompanists. Dressed in formal wear, but also incongruously bare-footed, the two violinists, violist and cellist form an integral visual element, moving about and interacting with the dancers. For their part, the dancers not only execute choreography, but are also called upon to speak and vocalize. Loewen says the result of this stretching of artistic boundaries is a richly sensual work that is more than the sum of its parts.
"It’ll be more explosive with two live energies at the same time," she says.
Monk, a veteran of the Canadian contemporary dance scene, was inspired to work with string players after she performed a solo with a live cellist in last year’s Winnipeg New Music Festival, where she observed how tenderly and expressively string players cradle their instruments.
Back at U of C, she asked Bell to work with the string quartet in rehearsals, spontaneously composing a musical score while she choreographed the dancers.
"I wanted the string players as part of the process of creation," Monk says.
The dancers and musicians loosened up for their collaboration through exercises such as call-and-response sessions, in which a musician would improvise a phrase and a dancer would respond with movement. As the piece evolved, the physical and aural artists continued to play off each other.
"The process reflects back and forth on itself many, many times, between the expression in the music and the expression in the dance," says Monk. "I might start a phrase with the dancers, and Allan would be there in the room with the string players, suggesting to them to try certain sounds. I probably was very subtly, but significantly, affected in my movement choices by the kind of response Allan would be making with his players. Then Allan would be watching the dancers and redirect the players with other ideas."
The title the open window to the wild hill is a quotation from Summer’s Drug, a sensual prose work by poet Roo Borson, dealing with a childhood memory of her parents sleeping with their window open.
"It’s got to do with summer evenings, and the smell of flowers on the trellis," says Monk. "I found this text particularly evocative. It serves as a metaphor for the dancers as to how imagination can bring us to present-moment focus....
"(The title) struck me as a nice metaphor for the process we've been through in creating the work, the open window being the communication between the music and the dance, and the wild hill being the force of creation itself."
For Edmond Agopian, first violinist in the quartet, the experience of responding to dancers is in some ways very familiar. He says that when playing with an orchestra, the motion of the conductor's arms expresses intensity, tempo, articulation and phrasing.
"You take a cue from those physical motions and interpret the music accordingly," he says.
Still, the classically trained musician was unfamiliar with the idea of being asked to freely improvise certain segments of the score, and also found it unusual to have to be conscious of how he carries himself.
"I did have to learn how to walk onstage so I don't look like a hippopotamus," says the slightly rumpled, bespectacled musician.
After the quartet enters the dancers' milieu for this weekend's Mainstage performances, the situation will be reversed. The open window to the wild hill will be presented as part of the Department of Musics Ensemble Series performance on April 3 at the Rozsa Centre. The piece will be featured on the same bill as Brahms's String Sextet so it will provide an interesting contrast of the classical with the contemporary.
Monk is certain that audiences will respond to the "live exchange" unfolding before them.
"The simultaneous live expression in music and dance is qualitatively richer," she says. "The energy of all those bodies is there, fresh, in that particular moment. It just brings a depth that isn't there with recorded work." |
