Sat 5/7 @ 8PM
Verb Ballets is preparing another concert, this one with two world premieres and three duets from the Verb repertoire. We drove by the Verb studios, watched rehearsals and talked to people. What’s shaping up for the upcoming concert at Breen Center may be even better than usual.
One of the premieres is being choreographed on Verb by Creative Fusion artist in residence Lee Ming-Cheng, here from Taiwan. Ming is himself a study in East/West cultural fusion, having studied dance at New York University as well as in Taiwan where he founded his own company, the Body Expression Dance Theatre (Body EDT), which combines Asian traditions with digital technology and dance movement from both East and West.
As we watch rehearsals for Ming’s piece, The Arrival of Departure, we see the dancers reviewing the choreography together. First they practice the big lifts and supports. Two of the men get down on their hands and knees, and two of the women stand on their backs and then get back down. Ming speaks to them in his own limited English and through an interpreter. “Quality of movement is important here; avoid visible changes of weight.” Ming demonstrates. The women follow suit. Later we see a much higher lift in which one of the women stands on a standing man’s shoulders, then falls into the arms of the other dancers. Traveling movements take the dancers’ hips low against the floor, all propelled by pulsing violins. It’s different and, from the look of it, taxing.
We spoke with Verb’s associate director, Richard Dickinson, during a break in rehearsal, and later on the phone. He explained that several dancers had been out of rehearsals for various reasons and that much of what we’d observed was getting returning dancers back up to speed. We asked if there was a language barrier.
“Dance is visual, so learning the movement at the beginning was the easy part,” says Dickinson. “But now it’s the clean-up process and that’s when spoken language becomes more important. Working on details, Ming and his translator try to come up with the right word and we try to – you know — guess what he means. Sometimes we get it right and sometimes we get it wrong, but understanding him becomes part of the process. So, yes, there’s a language barrier but it’s kind of fun. (Laughs.)
Later we spoke with Lee Ming-Cheng.
CoolCleveland: The video projections you’re using show the silhouette of a person wearing little animal ears. What is the significance of this figure?
Ming: Ah! Mr. Rabbit is a symbol of a human being’s innermost primal reach for his destiny. In the Chinese bestiary, Rabbit moves very fast and is very alert. He has big ears to listen to the inner calling, the inner heart, that which a person strives for.
CC: Do you intend the dancers’ movements to suggest animal, plant and human existence?
Ming: Yes, the animal nature, human nature, and nature itself. The movement of the dancer symbolizes a person’s reach and different aspects of the self reaching out. The dancer is reaching a higher level each time you see her. From the earth we rise up, fall, and rise again. Each time a little higher. From supports on another dancer’s back to the shoulders and then all the way up. It is our struggle to move past many, many obstacles in our evolution.
CC: Please talk about the title of your dance, The Arrival of Departure. Surely this translation skips over much nuance in the original Mandarin.
Ming: This dance begins with a dancer who is crying, searching her innermost self. She reaches out to search, longing for something, but she doesn’t know whether the longing is inside herself or outside. Through our mothers, each human being comes into this earth as one person and we leave this earth still as one person so we are always alone. But the story of the life illustrates the passage.
CC: Who composed the music for The Arrival of Departure?
Ming: Li Zhe Yi, a well-known Taiwanese musician and composer, composed this music especially for this dance.
The other premiere on the program is choreographed by Terence Greene, who has a long history in the Cleveland dance scene. He was artist in residence with Verb in 2009. For years he was dance director at Cleveland School of the Arts. Last year he used his Creative Workforce Fellowship from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture to present an unusually talented group of dancers to the Cleveland dance audience in Dance on the Edge.
Greene can be hard to reach by phone so we spoke further with Dickinson.
CC: What’s Terence’s piece like? You’ve seen it in rehearsal and it’s probably well along since Terence is known for working really fast.
RD: Secrets From Within is in three sections. The first section is called Trapped and so the movement reflects that title. People are trapped in their boxes, and they’re making really sharp, percussive movements. It’s done with chairs which figure prominently, at least at first.
The second section is called Secret. The chairs are gone and the movement is more expansive and flowing — not as dense as the first section. It’s more like a waltz than a hip-hop dance and he uses a lot of very interesting gestural movement.
Section three is called Release and that’s what it is, powerful movement that really gets people excited. I think it’s a great work. I like the transitions between the movements and by the end it is celebratory and you feel like you’ve taken a journey.
We wanted to see for ourselves so we dropped in on a rehearsal.
“This piece is difficult,” says Greene to the dancers.
“Yes,” say the dancers, grinning.
There’s a pause while Greene and Dickinson discuss the relationship between the studio space and the stage at Breen Center. Greene opts to move the chairs forward in the studio to enhance the claustrophobia in the first section. Then Greene and the dancers rehearse the first section, one phrase at a time, with Greene calling frequent halts.
“Stop. It’s too careful, y’all.”
Flailing arms and torsos up on the chairs and down. Greene keeps demanding more energy and abandon, calling individual dancers to account for errors in rhythm and direction. We’re relieved that none of the gyrating dancers collide with each other or the chairs in the tightly packed space, surprised at how Greene seems able to remember the complex rhythmic and spatial patterns. The seven dancers seldom move in unison, but for every beat of the recorded score, everyone has a specific assignment and Greene seems to know what it is.
After 40 minutes’ work on the first section, Greene gives the dancers a short break and then calls them back to run the entirety of Secrets From Within. The dance was much as Dickinson had described it, with the Verb dancers showing their beautiful arabesques in the expansive and flowing second section. All the energy that was gathered in the first two sections was released in the third section in simple, powerful figures.
The DJ mix of recorded music provides a background, a figured carpet on which the dancers perform, but it’s the choreography, the movement study in counterpoint or polyrhythms, that pulls this 15-minute dance through its arc of rising and releasing tension. Greene and the Verb dancers have been working this territory for years now but we’ll remember Secrets From Within for a long time as a high water mark.
Also on the program at the Breen Center are three duets from Verb’s repertoire, all well worth repeated viewings. In previous issues of CoolCleveland.com we previewed Ne Me Quitte Pas and the pas de deux from Spartacus HERE and reviewed Spring Waters HERE.
Tickets are $10-$35. Go to verbballets.org or call 888-718-4253.
[Written by Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas]Cleveland, OH 44113