The Wake

Dance is such a basic human experience. We dance when music, alcohol or solitude help us overcome our inhibitions. But for all the visceral appeal of movement, the idea of watching people who are skilled at dance perform their work sometimes seems like one of those high-brow cultural experiences that are more likely to inspire yawning than awareness of the animal self. Maybe the rigid movements and predictability of classical ballet have given dance a bad name. Or, conversely, the density and oddity of modern dance just weird people out. In any case, too few people feel comfortable in a roomful of leotards and bare feet. Luckily, there’s an event coming up where we can all relax and take dance for the joyful expression is should be.

Each year, the University of Minnesota dance program commissions four accomplished choreographers to work with students on a series of fully staged performances. Dance Revolutions is your chance to see entertaining new works that are richly costumed and theatrically lit. It’s more spectacular than watching a student work-in-progress and more accessible than the hoity-toity touring ballet companies that come to Northrop.

Jazz specialist Hannah Stilwell uses African and Cuban dance forms to create Relished, the piece that will open Dance Revolutions with nine women weaving among each other and, at one point, miming dance with a partner.

American master Merce Cunningham created Inlets 2 to evoke the landscape of Puget Sound. The piece calls for four women and three men in colorful leotards to freeze in otherworldly positions, break into an urgent run, and then calmly sway, rarely in unison, to the sounds of flowing water and crackling fire. Dance historian Karen Eliot reset Inlets 2 for Dance Revolutions, relying on her extensive knowledge of Cunningham, video of Cunningham’s company performing the dance and reams of notes.

When Tere O’Connor designed Frozen Mommy as a Boy especially for the group of students that will perform it, he must have been thinking something like: ladies walking around in high heels are funny. Opera singers are funny. Crying hard is funny. Butts are funny. Let’s make fun of them. (I once attended a modern dance performance where all the in the audience were in hysterics whenever the dancers would move a certain way, because it was apparently some reference or whatever, but the rest of us were clueless. Frozen, I promise, will make everyone laugh because it’s iconoclastic on a broader level and silly like SpongeBob Square Pants.) Dancers often make their own soundtrack in Frozen by melodramatically stomping, hissing, moaning, and shouting. Much of the material comes from everyday interactions among the students in the piece, and O’Connor allowed the dancers to design their own costumes, which are based on street clothes.

U alumnus and faculty member Carl Flink creates an alien world with no gender in This Bleeding Heart… Dancers will wear formal, high-collared garments that disintegrate toward the bottom into organic, flowing fabric. In what Flink calls a self-portrait on eight bodies, a bright halogen light will move around the theater, focusing alternately on one or many dancers and creating long, expressionistic shadows. Watching this dance, which will also show at The Southern theater in the spring, is emotionally riveting because of the dramatic interactions of the performers. They hold hands, fall into one another, catch, lift and throw each other. One kicks another off the stage like someone would kick a rock down the street. It is beautiful in its complexity.

Dance Revolutions shows at Rarig Center in the West Bank Arts Quarter on December10, 11 and 12. Call (612) 624-2345 for tickets, and ask about a student discount.