Walking into the theatre at the Yard in Chilmark during a dance rehearsal this week, one couldn’t help noticing a spilled glass of water on the edge of the stage, and, upon further inspection, a puddle in the middle of the floor. A few minutes later a dancer stood in the middle of said puddle, relishing its slippery nature.
Oddly enough, moments like these are all normal occurrences at the Yard, a dance retreat known for its nurturing environment by providing artists a place to live, breathe and work on their craft. Most of all it’s a place where process is the main event, the performance secondary, and playing freely without boundaries celebrated.
For the past month four young choreographers have been doing just that, using the Yard as their playground for experimenting with new work. The culmination of this residency will be shown this weekend at the annual Bessie Schönberg Choreographers Residency performance.
This year’s choreographers, Cori Olinghouse, Julia Eichten, Charlotte Griffin and Kate Watson Wallace, all received housing, stipends, work space, artistic mentoring and dancers through the residency program, originally created by Yard founder Patricia Nanon. Artistic director David White said these four choreographers embody exactly what Ms. Nanon set out to do nearly 40 years ago.
“What people will see ranges from wild and woolly, the chaos theory end of choreography, to very formal, what you may think of as contemporary or modern dance,” Mr. White said at the Yard this week. “It’s interesting to watch these artists because they can all lean on each other’s wavelength, critique and observe each other.”
The choreographers share dancers and collaborate with each other, something Mr. White said has created a “bond across aesthetic lines.”
This bond was in evidence when the choreographers took time before the start of another eight-hour rehearsal day on Wednesday morning. Coffee mugs in hand, thoughts still collecting and minds still a little groggy, the choreographers encouraged each other to talk about their work and process.
Ms. Griffin has been working with cardboard disks and the idea of building structures, but instead of skyscrapers for inspiration, the Vineyard landscape of ocean, trees and rolling hills has been the base of much of her work.
“Some of the material comes from kinesthetically building on a solid foundation or an elusive base,” she said. “We’ve also been playing with the idea, something Kate [Wallace] pointed out to me, of nature frequencies. I was kind of thinking about the most solid foundations and elusive base, and that would be water, earth, air, built into quality of movement.
“It’s also very much about intimacy, ultimately we build structures whether they’re abstract systems or functioning buildings, we build all of these things for human interactions.”
Ms. Wallace said she and Ms. Olinghouse are interested in how to use different vocabularies of dance and how that material can be manipulated into a character.
“[I’ve been looking at] many vocabularies or characters or modes of movement happening in the body simultaneously or sequentially, and all of that within an improvisational form,” Ms. Wallace said. “So I’ve been working in a practice that has to do with that, how do you go into a trance state and access those forms, identity and what’s coming off different bodies.”
Ms. Olinghouse has taken the idea of identity literally, working with costumes and masks. She’s building material for a duet at the Yard, but plans to take it to another level when she returns home to New York city, maybe by adding more visual art components or reworking the duet into a larger cast.
“I’m working a lot with costumes and masks as a pinnacle to allow various forms to come in our bodies,” she said. “Both the mask characters are ghost characters that are identityless. There’s something about taking identity completely away and working with fixed forms.”
Ms. Eichten stayed away from fixed forms and is concentrating on the way energy moves through the body.
“I wanted to play with water and started with water balloons,” she said. “I wanted them to be on people so they could experience this expansion and movement through the body which water does so lovely.” The water balloons wouldn’t stay put, though, so she turned to bottles and cups.
All choreographers agreed it was easy to be inspired by the Vineyard, especially when the natural world was amplified with recent rumblings from Mother Nature – the East Coast earthquake that occurred last week and more recently, Hurricane Irene.
Ms. Griffin said the language she used to talk about her piece changed over the monthlong residency, and Ms. Eichten said it had been easier to connect to the universe in the Yard’s studios. Ms. Olinghouse acknowledged that she was already working on storm imagery for her piece when the hurricane hit. She and her duet partner, Eva Schmidt, learned how to walk forward while leaning into the wind on Sunday.
It is this kind of immersion that has helped to develop their choreography process, that and working with a group of dancers who are not only ready to explore boundaries alongside the choreographers but also support them, the choreographers said.
They’ve lived together, danced together, sweated together and maybe even cried together, but in the process a community was formed. And it is this community that has been the cornerstone for the Yard this season.
“This is the essence of where the Yard came from and whatever else the Yard has done over the years,” Mr. White said. “There is this idea that artists come to a place where their work can ferment. It just reminds me that this is where the Yard is rooted.”
The Bessie Schönberg Choreographers Residency performance is tonight at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. Tickets are $25 for general seating and $15 for students and are available at dancetheyard.org or 508-645-9661. The 4 p.m. abbreviated performance on Saturday is free.
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