Chamber Dance Company Celebrates Its 20th Season

Twenty year snapshots of history can be both momentous and minimal depending upon your perspective or point of view. For the Chamber Dance Company at the University of Washington, the opportunity to reflect on the steadfast nature of the company’s mission and focus against the reality of its ever-changing corps of dancers and choreographers is the perfect time to remind ourselves why this company and this mission are as crucial as ever.

The mission of the company is to bring work from the modern dance canon to life for audiences here in the Northwest. Unlike ballet, where aficionados know the great works almost by heart, the seminal works of modern dance history are on the verge of being lost to a generation of dancers unclear about which works were and are important to this day.

Enter the Chamber Dance Company and Artistic Director Hannah Wiley, who spent years combing the stacks of dusty archives on both coasts and significant points in between to discover the works and histories of those choreographers (some well known and some all but forgotten) who created and nurtured work in support of a new kind of movement. At its beginnings, modern dance built the cultural bridge between the high art of ballet and the folk and pedestrian movement of the masses to create a vocabulary as unique to dance as jazz is to music. While the genre boundaries between the various movement styles are far more artificial today (if no less real) than they were in the early 1900s, it’s still difficult for us to fathom the sensationalism brought about by early modern dance in concert. At its most basic, CDC works to bring that experience to audiences today by exposing the pure radicalism and audacity of some of modern dance’s greatest proponents.

This year’s 20^th concert season brings to the stage three new reproductions of work by Loie Fuller. While not a choreographer or dancer in the traditional sense, Fuller created moving images with fabric and light that make her more well known in cinematic and lighting circles than as a modern dancer. Her focus on the “look” or feel of a piece more than the specific technique can marginalize her contributions in the eyes of some, but she was a true pioneer and was almost solely responsible for ensuring that dance had a place in live “theatricals” of the day. Not only did she pave the way for artists such as Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis, but her ideas about giving the audience something theatrical can be seen in the later works of Alwin Nikolais, Moses Pendleton (Pilobolus and MOMIX) and Cirque de Soleil.

Years later, political passions were the key to modern dance’s avant garde. This concert includes work by Joseph Gifford of the New Dance Group. This community of dancers, formed in response to the killing of a labor organizer in New Jersey in 1932, created dances with a sense of deep feeling. They were not interested in “pretty.” They were not interested in uniformity. Their hallmark was to "place great value on their differences and the specificity and rigor of each dance style.” CDC spent six days working with the octogenarian Gifford to stage his dance The Pursued (1947). The work is Gifford’s response to seeing Picasso’s Guernica and serves as an apt reminder of the history and value of an artist’s response to war. By using less complex movement, his simple choreography highlights the commonality of all people. He and others in the New Dance Group paved the way for such artists as Alvin Ailey and Trisha Brown to bring everyday movement to the stage.

Jumping ahead to the post modern dance movement, the concert features Fugue (1970), an early work by Twyla Tharp and one that set her on a trajectory to virtual super stardom as a choreographer. For dancers and for the audience, the piece is both wickedly complicated and simplistic in its movement vocabulary. Just as a musical fugue plays with phrasing, this work performed by three dancers accompanied by the sound of breath and the stomping of feet, gives total focus to the movement itself. Just as Fuller, Gifford and others had done before her, Tharp gives full attention to the movement. For the original 1970s audience, the movement presented in a bold and straightforward manner, stripped of any added spectacle or psychological overtones, was almost revolutionary.

The 1990s ushered in the post post-modern era and the attempt to replace formal movement with a more pedestrian and accessible style. Real life stories replaced the mythic fables of the past in an attempt to make dance real to people. David Dorfman and Dan Froot’s hysterical Bull (1994) satirizes the traditional role of the male dancer as a stage prop and explores emotion, power and sexuality to a spoken word score.

The concert closes with Doug Elkins’ 1995 Bessie Award winning Center My Heart. This work celebrates movement and community and seeks to highlight physicality as the essential human communication that can cross boundaries, language and cultures. One hundred years after Loie Fuller’s twirling silks and attempts to be the night sky and the wind, dancers and choreographers are still seeking ways to express and feel the complicated patterns of life. Watching this century of work over the period of 90 minutes highlights how much has changed in the world of dance and how much all these choreographers have in common with one another.

The Chamber Dance Company’s 20^th concert opens Thursday, October 9 and runs through Sunday, October 12. Performances are at 7:30 PM Thursday through Saturday and at 2:00 PM on Sunday at Meany Hall for the Performing Arts. Tickets are available at the UW Arts ticket office at 206-543-4880 or online at www.meany.org