Sat 2/8 @ 8PM
How strange that choreographers — especially ballet choreographers — are so often men and so seldom women. What to do? Grants? Commissions? Verb Ballets’ upcoming program at Breen Center, 4X4: Four Works by Female Choreographers, takes direct action. To get an overview of the concert, we spoke with Richard Dickinson, Verb’s associate artistic director, and also with two of the choreographers, Cleveland’s own Kay Eichman and the sought-after Chicago-based Stephanie Martinez (pictured, above).
Dancers could boast of bouquets or curtain calls, but so often they instead tell stories about mishaps on stage. Why? Because a trip, stumble and fall is more interesting than a flawless performance. And that’s the story Kay Eichman tells about her first experience with Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony when she was dancing in Dennis Nahat’s and Ian Horvath’s Cleveland Ballet.
Kay Eichman: It was a rehearsal with orchestra and the floor was this black marley that wasn’t finished correctly so everyone was slipping. We were coming around with a big grande jete — Cynthia Graham, Jaime Roque in the middle, and me — when my pointe shoe slipped on the marley. I went down, tried to break my fall with my hand and broke my wrist.
I screamed bloody murder and the orchestra thought it was time to take a break so they stopped playing. People came up to me as I was lying there saying prayers over me, but my wrist was broken and that was it. I had all these really beautiful principal roles coming up in Mendelssohn and Ozone Hour. Hah! That was the end of that.”
CoolCleveland: So how did you decide to choreograph to the music that was your jinx?
KE: It just kept popping up. Fast forward 15 more years of dancing and I started to choreograph and every once in a while that music would pop up and I’d say, “Oh, no,” until it popped up again a year ago and it was time to use it. I set the first movement on Creative Arts Dance Academy and that’s where Maggie [Dr. Margaret Carlson, Verb’s producing artistic director] saw it and said, “We can put this on Verb.” That’s when I made it longer, adding the second and fourth movements.
CC: How many dancers?
KE: Five girls and four boys.
CC: How long is your piece?
KE: Right around 20 minutes.
CC: And if you had to describe this music in one word?
KE: Joyful! This is considered one of the most joyful pieces Mendelssohn ever wrote. And you can hear that from the very beginning.
CC: The fourth movement is very fast. Talk about what you gave the dancers for that movement.
KE: It’s like, how fast can an animal move? Roadrunner? Speedy Gonzales? The dancers are like, “Aye yi yi!” They’re moving fast. I didn’t want to do that section half time like some choreographers would.
CC: Richard tells us that your Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony is a hard piece in terms of stamina.
KE: At first the Verb dancers weren’t used to so many counts and so many steps. But the big difference was that Cleveland Ballet had so many more dancers; the dancers from one movement would exit and fresh dancers would enter for the next movement. But the Verb dancers didn’t get to rest; they had to dance the whole thing. I was concerned but they kept saying, “We’re fine. We’re fine.”
CC: When we asked Richard what you bring to Verb, he said, “Bending.” Please explain.
KE: I really wanted them to bend their bodies more, use their port de bras, use their head more. Don’t just bend an inch. Bend 10 inches. It makes the step look like something. It makes it more expressive.
CC: Nice costumes. Who gets the costume credit?
KE: Janet Bolick.
CC: Ah, the ubiquitous Janet Bolick. She does a lot of dance costumes.
KE: These costumes were the last ones we pulled out from under Verb’s old costume stock. Maggie kept pulling out costumes saying, “What do you think of this?” “No.” “What do you think of this?” “No.” Finally she drags this out and I say, “Oh.” They were from who knows how long ago and they looked horrible but Janet dyed them and I put rhinestones on them. She did a great job.
Next we spoke with Stephanie Martinez about her dance that she’s setting on Verb, Wandering On. Asked about the title, she explained that it referred to Samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth in Hinduism and Buddhism.
Stephanie Martinez: I went to an all-girls Catholic school but when I began reading about eastern religions and meditating the idea of Samsara resonated with me. I was particularly drawn to the idea that getting to the other side is not without effort and the assistance of others.
CC: You’ve set Wandering On on several dance companies, correct?
SM: First I did it at National Choreographers Initiative (NCI) in Irvine, California, then Eugene Ballet in 2016. Then a shorter version on Dance Kaleidoscope and now here.
CC: Tell us more about NCI please.
SM: NCI is an incubator for choreographers — particularly ballet choreographers — to work with ballet dancers from all over. You get to work out an idea there and then take it somewhere else if you think it’s something you want to continue to work on. When you’re in a laboratory of sorts, it’s always wonderful to be able to create something that’s not under the gun of a performance but flushing out new ideas so we can fail forward and not rely on our same old tool box. You can create new things when you have the freedom to do so. At NCI you could make anything you wanted, big or small, and have these wonderful professional dancers to work with.
CC: This reminds me of something we have here in Northeast Ohio, the National Center for Choreography at University of Akron.
SM: I don’t actually know a lot about it but people really gravitate toward it. I should probably look into it.
CC: So, how has Wandering On changed?
SM: For Verb I’m condensing it from 20 minutes to 13. It starts with a breathing landscape for the first movement.
CC: A breathing landscape?
SM: Breath sounds and heartbeats. It’s a recording I made in a studio with a friend. The breathing landscape is an addition, a change from what I did for Eugene Ballet.
CC: A reference to meditation.
SM: Yes. Meditation provides a path from the physical body to the spiritual world. The dancing for the breathing landscape develops into a double pas de deux. The second movement is set to music by Lars Meyer. The dancing in the second movement is a duet I created in remembrance of a friend of mine who lost his wife. He would see her in his dreams. They would have this wonderful relationship and so he didn’t want to wake up.
CC: We suspect that duet has a lot of emotional resonance for you.
SM: It does. He was both sad and happy as he told me how he looked forward to falling asleep and dreaded waking up.
CC: What other music do you use in Wandering On?
SM: The music for the third section is by Andrew Hewitt, “A Boy Held Up By a String”. And for the last section the music is by Ezzo Bosso, “Sixth Breath, Last Breath”.
CC: How many of the Verb dancers will you use?
SM: Four men and seven women.
CC: Wandering On is contemporary ballet but not en pointe, correct?
SM: It’s contemporary ballet but it is en pointe.
CC: That’s a big change from what you did with Eugene Ballet. We’ll be interested to see all your contemporary vocabulary with pointe work. What about lighting? Have you brought a light plot from earlier versions of your dance?
SM: Trad Burns will be lighting it. He and I will need to talk because this is a shorter version and I’d like to have his input. He and I worked together in the past. He did a wonderful job lighting my piece Dos Lados at Moving Arts Cincinnati.
CC: Looking at other interviews you’ve done, we gather that you’re willing to talk about how you create.
SM: As dancers we all work in a physical form, but I want to talk about emotions and relationships. I’m always interested in how the body expresses emotions and ideas through movement because we’re dealing in non-verbal communication. Actors can say, “I feel this,” but in dance it’s different. There’s a physical expression that the body needs to have an intention for. Otherwise it’s just ornamental.
I like to go beyond simple steps. So how do you physicalize pain? Joy? Especially with ballet dancers I say, “I want to see your liver move,” so we can get in the body and can start to create language that is somehow different from the normal tendu. Of course we’re going to do tendu but it starts somewhere else. So I work a lot from the inside out and then we start working with the form of whoever the dancers are in front of me.
For me dance is a really powerful impulse and channeling it through a skillful artist can truly touch an audience, hopefully evoking some kind of emotion in whoever’s witnessing.
***
Asked about another piece on the program, Diana y Acteon, Richard Dickinson said, “It’s fun,” but then he immediately added, “It’s very difficult.”
That was our impression watching three versions on YouTube, one difficult transition after another. As part of the Cleveland Havana Ballet Project, Laura Alonso set it on the Verb dancers last year but this is Verb’s Cleveland premiere of this showpiece. Lieneke Matte and Benjamin Shepard are dancing it. The ballet makes scant reference to the story of Diana and Acteon as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. (Acteon the hunter accidently comes upon the goddess Diana bathing; she takes offense, turns him into a stag, and he is torn apart by his own dogs.)
When the choreographer Agrippa Vaganova lifted the music (by Cesare Pugni) for this dance from a different, earlier Petipa ballet, she choreographed an entirely new dance and renamed it Diana y Acteon but — go figure — made scant reference in her choreography to Ovid’s story of Diana and Acteon. Richard tells us, however, that apparently the Cubans have put that back in because, at the end of this version of the pas de deux, Diana looses an arrow in Acteon’s direction as he leaps off stage.
Also on the program, Verb dancer Kate Webb’s Stellar Syncopations set to a complex score by beloved Akron jazz player and composer Pat Pace.
Verb performs 4X4: Four Works by Female Choreographers at the Breen Center for the Performing Arts in Ohio City. Tickets are $10-$35. For tickets go to verbballets.org/4×4/.
[Written by Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas]
Cleveland, OH 44113