Two Weeks Out

Antaeus Dance's performance of select premiere excerpts from Prospect & Refuge opens in two weeks. We are part of a double-bill with Travesty Dance Group/Cleveland, a local company directed by friend and colleague Kimberly Karpanty. TDG will premiere Kim's full-length work Dawning. The companies are a good match in several ways. Kim and I definitely overlap in aesthetics, yet we have distinct voices and very different ways of speaking. The intersection of individual and community is important to both of us and serves as a fairly consistent theme in our work.

Kim is a marvelous choreographer, creating extended, complex movement phrases, seemingly in the blink of a eye. I have always been more of a slow-cooker myself, taking time to develop movement ideas and, of late, working closely with the dancers in finding and exploring movement. These different personalities and approaches of the two companies yield a rich diversity in the works.

Prospect & Refuge is an ongoing evening-length project that will premiere in full in the spring of 2011. It began, rather unexpectedly, with Verb Ballets in early 2009. I had been developing ideas and movement for a new evening-length, already bearing the given title, when I was invited to be a part of the Cleveland All Stars concert (more recently called Fresh Inventions). I decided to use the opportunity to explore one idea, Stray, in advance of working with Antaeus Dance. The eight dancers of Verb Ballets were lovely and I enjoyed the time I spent with them.

After that, I continued to develop Stray into a longer piece for the twelve members of the Kent Dance Ensemble at Kent State University. At the same time, I began work with long-time dance partner and fellow dance maker Doug Lodge in rural Pennsylvania, brainstorming and visiting potential film sites, including an abandoned factory and a condemned farm house. In October of 2009, while the company was in Meadville for it's annual fall concert at Allegheny College, we filmed the dancers over the course of two days in site-specific improvisations on a theme. I returned to PA in January of this year to work with Doug on a duet that was later filmed in the bell tower at Pilgrim Congregational Church by media artist Cynthia Penter.

Having finished my work with the Kent Dance Ensemble, I then began to rework Stray for the eight dancers in the Antaeus Dance Prospect & Refuge project and have been running both versions (similar though not identical) in their respective venues. The KSU students contributed greatly to the work, willingly exploring ideas and successfully meeting challenges that I put before them. They have my hearty thanks for bringing the work forth so clearly!

While all of this was going on, I was endeavoring to move other parts of the dance forward. This turned out to be a challenge given that my entree into the work had been so highly structured and I was attempting to engage the Antaeus Dancers in a more collaborative process while also working with a second dance artist and a composer and a film maker. All of this brings us to Cleveland Public Theatre's DanceWorks 2010. The Company will premiere four sections of Prospect & Refuge. The overarching idea for me has been the creation of a thematic modular dance, one that can change with time and venue, one that does not always appear in the same order in which it was last presented, one which plays with perspective through both film and live dance, and one which allows everyone involved to contribute to the process.

I look forward to seeing you at the premiere!

Joan

Photo 1 of Heather Koniz supporting Amy Compton by Joan Meggitt.

Photo 2 of Travesty Dance Group/Cleveland in Dawning by Bob Christy.

Photo 3 of the Bell Tower in Pilgrim Church by Joan Meggitt.

Photo 4 of Kent Dance Ensemble members in Stray by Bob Christy.