Dancers pumped their bare feet against the smooth wood floor in relevés, ingested bellies full of air and exhaled while shaking their arms from shoulders to hands inside Cameron Art Museum’s Weyerhauser Reception Hall Sunday, March 15 as they prepped to audition for the Wilmington Dance Festival. The work-in-process venue, hosted by the Dance Co-Operative, has been open to the public one Sunday per month.
“It’s really fun for people who don’t dance to see how it works,” said Nancy Carson, Dance Co-Op co-founder and University of North Carolina Wilmington dance professor. “I think that’s really cool.”
The choreography workshop format encouraged comments from the audience during the three consecutive months work was shared. At the auditions, Carson said in a March 23 phone interview, an assembled board of dance adjudicators gauged the work for performance readiness and performance quality, or accessibility and appropriateness for all ages.
“Just ask yourself: ‘What am I feeling when I watch this?’ Don’t worry about what it means,” said Doris Levy, University of North Carolina Wilmington retired dance professor and Dance Co-Operative board member. Levy was a member of the panel that judged the work.
“I can only speak about my perspective,” Levy said during a March 24 phone interview, “and that is I like to look at it from the outside, and want the program to be interesting. From the inside, I want to see pieces that are cohesive, they’re entertaining, they have integrity.”
The works auditioned were largely amateur pieces not fully rehearsed, Levy observed.
“We could only kind of tell where they would be going,” she said.
Well-performed pieces, dancers who relate well to one another, clear movements and clear shapes were among her criteria.
“I like to see an idea that’s carried through, whether it’s an idea that has no literal meaning — it could be about shapes and colors and quality of movement, and not have a literal theme, or it could have a literal theme,” Levy said. “Generally you can tell which is which when you watch.”
Choreographer Anne Firmender’s duet set to “Run from Me Darlin’” pairs a well-matched man and woman who together explore the heights and depths of passion.
“That was definitely a literal theme about that relationship,” Levy said.
The emotional import of the piece is color, Levy said.
“Color doesn’t have to do with the colors of costumes,” she explained. “For me, color has to do with some connection that produces a feeling; I’m not talking about just gestural movement that produces a feeling … but also the piece generally has gradations of hues that you would call tones that give us feelings that we react to. It could have bright hues, mostly grays; it could be a piece with lots of contrast. These are very short pieces so you’re not getting a tremendous amount of development. In a longer piece you would probably get to see more and more contrast; but in the short piece it has to be cohesive so you give up some of that.”
In contrast to Firmender’s duet, Levy noted a light piece choreographed by Linda Webb.
“Very different tone there, very different level of excitement, different kinds of excitement in those two pieces,” Levy said. “The movement in one was . . . more like contemporary modern dance. The other was more like jazz. Those things in themselves produce response.”
Webb’s showy, old-school Fosse-esque choreography shifted into a male-dominated romp set to Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk.”
“What’s she good at doing,” Levy said, “is making non-dancers look really good.”
Because dance is ephemeral, she continued, “You look at the piece and it’s gone. You might remember some repetitions. … I want things repeated, even if it’s a little movement motif, I want to see things more than once, unless seeing it only once has a special meaning. It goes by so fast. The more trained your eye is the more you can retain, but it shouldn’t be for the trained eye. It should be for anybody. That’s something important I think, that there is movement you can remember. The impression may be all you’re left with. Some people won’t have a memory of the details.”
In Cape Fear Dance Theatre’s “Carolina, Section 1: Cotton,” choreography by Amber Patee Adams set to music by Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile’s “Goat Rodeo Sessions” and danced by Adams, Emily Bannerman, Sydney Jones and Emily Lawler, explores the rites of passage associated with female adolescence.
“We think that piece was going to be a lot longer,” Levy said. “We were very interested in seeing how that piece was going to be developed. It was almost too short for the depth of what she was exploring. It’s a very rich piece, there’s a lot of potential in that piece.”
Adams is one of a number of new faces noted by Carson.
“As we become aware of more dancers in the community — when we first started this we used each other a lot, and we danced a lot — but as we grow and as the community develops I think it’s great that we’re seeing new faces and it’s really exciting for us to have new dancers and new perspectives and new personalities,” Carson said.
Carson said the appearance of male dancers and choreographers is a welcome addition.
“I myself have six dancing in my piece,” she said. “We also have two men who are choreographers this time, which we have not had before, two in one specific show, so that’s pretty exciting. It’s just really beautiful to see.”
The Wilmington Dance Festival evolved when the Dance Co-Operative amicably separated from the North Carolina Dance Festival.
“The North Carolina Dance Festival had to make some changes in how they present their work and we just were not financially able to provide what they needed. We separated amicably,” Carson said.
The Dance Co-operative, Carson said, hopes to grow its own annual event. The goal of the co-op is to be a shared and learning experience as well as a performance outlet, Carson said.
The festival runs two consecutive evenings 8 p.m. March 27 and 28 at City Stage Theatre, 21 North Front St. Tickets are $15 in advance and $18 at the door.
Two free master classes will be offered Saturday, March 28 at the Dance Co-op, 5202 Carolina Beach Road, with guest choreographer Melissa Pihos.
Call 910-763-4995 or visit http://wilmingtondance
festival.brownpapertickets.com/
email [email protected]
