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92nd St. Y’s Harkness Festival nurtures tomorrow’s divas
Hilary Easton + Company
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One of the most exciting things about New York is its dance scene. The best companies in the world rehearse and perform in theaters around town, and the 92nd St. Y Harkness Dance Festival has provided a stage for these lesser-known-soon-to-be-household-name choreographers for the past 15 years. 2009 is no different, and for the fourth year the festival will call the Ailey Citigroup Theater, a 220 seat venue, home.
Renata Celichowska, director of the 92nd St. Y Harkness Dance Center and curator of the festival, says of the five companies performing, “We focus on a curatorial theme, essentially young and new artists who are ready to test the water in week-long performances for a larger audience.” However, this doesn’t mean audiences won’t find better known choreographers like Douglas Dunn at the festival, where he’ll be reconstructing a work he did with the Paris Opera in the 1980s.
Hilary Easton + Company opens the festival with a debut called The Reclamation. She says of the performance, “I am very curious at the ways in which the planet creates certain kinds of reactions and corrections to man’s behavior; we see it for example in the greater frequency and violence of the recent hurricanes. It’s interesting to me that the ways in which we destroy the earth also ultimately give us less (space, resources, time) as a race, not more.”
The Reclamation symbolically offers an interpretation of the give and take between the actors and the dancers, to give that feeling of the tension between man’s actions and the earth’s reactions. Two actors, Jean Taylor and Steven Rattazzi, limit dancers access to the stage, ultimately explaining why they found it necessary.
This is Easton’s second work with the dancers involved—Alexandra Albrecht, Michael Ingle, Joshua Palmer, and Emily Pope-Blackman—and her first time presenting at the Harkness Dance Festival. But she isn’t new to the Center. She grew up with the Center as a teen, participating in the “Red Yellow Blue and Glue” program.
Since then she’s become well known around town for work that displays wit in the face of complicated topics, most notably memory, the role of efficiency (and its opposite) in daily life, and the difficulties of dogmatic thinking. Easton collaborated with video artist Anna Kiraly for the first time and with composer Thomas Cabaniss, whom she has worked with since 2005.
“This work gave us the opportunity to stretch in new ways. It’s a very different kind of score, for keyboards, strings and melodica…and the video images create an evocative ‘world’ for the dance: both clarifying and expanding the piece’s visual possibilities,” Easton says. “It’s just a thrilling project.”
Closing out the festival is Jeremy Nelson, who is collaborating with instillation artist and dancer Luis Lara Malvacias and presenting “Sooner Than You Think.” “Sooner” will combine the visual landscape created by Malvacias, the video art of David Tirosh, and solos by Nelson and Malvacias who will be dancing them for the first time.
“Over the course of the last year both Luis and I have been traveling, mostly separately,” says Nelson, “and so we became really interested in the idea of how we adapt to all these different spaces that we find ourselves in—a new apartment or hotel room, a new dance studio, a new airport terminal—and how it effects us physically and psychologically.” Thus the theme for “Sooner” emerged. The two dancers will find themselves alone in their respective environments—which will consist of hangings, free-standing structures, videos and what Nelson describes as “human set elements”—but will occasionally overlap.
Nelson explains: “The focus of this project—where the space and it’s limitations operate on and shape what the dancer is doing, is for me a very interesting progression in this conversation between mover and the space. Instead of the dancer doing all the talking, now the space and its limitations (through Luis’s sets and installations) has at least an equal voice in the creation of the dance.”