Sinopoli fuses art and science
Dance and music are an obvious pairing. Dance and poetry — a bit less common, certainly, but still intuitive. But what about dance and physics, or dance and photography?
With the right collaborators, even unlikely fusions make perfect sense. On Thursday evening, choreographer Ellen Sinopoli presented a selection of work made over the past quarter century with faculty from the University at Albany’s College of Arts and Sciences. The performance was part of the College’s 25th-anniversary celebration this fall.
The most unexpected co-creation was also the most striking: “Texture of the Whole,” from 2014, which was shaped over a full semester by Sinopoli and physics professor Keith Earle. Derived from physics concepts — such as symmetry breaking, echo fragmentation and vortex shedding — the piece somehow feels both chaotic and ordered, just as nature does. Propelled by invisible forces, the dancers intersect, ricochet off one another, zoom backwards and get horizontal, angular and fluid all at once. They are flowers of a petal opening and closing, or parts of a machine, or rogue molecules dividing. The score by Brian Eno is a perfect match.
“Clusters,” from 1995, sets spare, gestural movement against a backdrop of evocative black-andwhite images by Thom O’connor, faculty emeritus from the College’s Department of Art, with music by Azerbaijani composer Franghiz Ali-zadeh. A magical conjoining takes place as the patterns of trees, flowers and a cloudy sky are projected onto the dancers’ white costumes as they cross the floor, making them appear almost translucent. And sometimes the dancers — or rather their shadowed silhouettes — enter the mysterious landscapes of the photographs.
The score for the duet “Pierre’s Words” (1997) interweaves percussion by composer Joel Chadabe, faculty emeritus from the Department of Music, and poetry by Pierre Joris, faculty emeritus from the Department of English (both performed live Thursday). The three elements of the work share a sense of play and experimentation: As the score glides and meanders, Sara Senecal and Laura Teeter feel their way through balances and juxtapositions, using two chairs as bases for their forays, and Joris savors the hiss and quiver of words on his tongue.
The program also included “Relay,” from 1993, a fun, fast-paced ensemble work with athletic choreography that loosely references sports and races, set to Chadabe’s upbeat electronic score. Sinopoli also debuted a new piece, “As Seen From Above,” set to music by William Matthews played live by the Capital Trio, the Performing Arts Center’s ensemble-inresidence. While she was inspired by the movement of birds, the dancers also seem like embodiments of the piano, violin and cello notes — not literal interpretations of the score, but rather reflections of the way in which individual parts of a whole by turns stand alone, overlap, twine together and dissolve into each other.
Tresca Weinstein is a frequent contributor to the Times Union.