CELEBRATION THEME OF NEW SINOPOLI PROGRAM
Choreographer seeks to invoke freedom to move
When Ellen Sinopoli set out to choreograph a new work during the time of COVID, she didn’t want to focus on isolation, or distance, or containment. Instead, she looked for ways to create space and freedom for her dancers, physically and emotionally, after months of limitation.
“I really wanted to celebrate movement, and put as much movement as I possibly could into this 10 minutes,” Sinopoli said in a recent interview. “I didn’t want it to be sad, I didn’t want it to be pensive. I wanted it to explode, to really wake up the audience.”
The result is “Slipping Through,” a duet for Erin Dooley and Maggie Ciambrone, with music by jazz musician Don Byron. The work will have its premiere on Friday at 7 p.m. as part of the company ’s second virtual performance, which kicks off its 30th anniversary season.
Titled “As Close As We Can (Take 2!),” the evening features four pre-recorded works interspersed with the dancers’ reflections and a live Q&A with the choreographer, much like the first “As Close As We Can” installment in June. Along with the new work, the program includes three repertory pieces, which Sinopoli reworked in response to social distancing protocols—a challenging task, given that her choreography typically includes closely interwoven partnering and ensemble work.
“How do we capture that sense of wrapping around each other and intertwining with each other when we are literally not doing that and have to be a certain distance apart? It required the dancers to become very aware of how to respond to what their partner or partners are doing,” she said.
In rehearsals—conducted mostly via Zoom, with a few in-person run-throughs in large open spaces—the company has developed a new approach that communicates a sense of connection and reliance on one another, minus the actual touch. For example, a moment in the 1991
I was trying to create the possibility of still having an interconnectedness. When you capture the essence of the movement and the essence of the physicality, it’s no longer a problem that you’re trying to solve, it’s just a different way of saying something.” — Sinopoli
duet “Dreams,” where André Robles assists Laura Teeter as she does a slow forward roll, was pulled apart so that the dancers are executing the same movements, yards away from each other.
“We capture an aspect of the essence of that forward roll, and of Laura being supported in it,” Sinopoli explained. “It took a lot of thought and experimentation with timing and angles.”
She and the dancers also experimented with different ways of integrating the digital element, using multiple cameras to film each work and playing with the visual concept of a divided screen, as with the 1997 piece “Pierre’s Words,” danced by Sara Senecal and Teeter.
“We have Laura in one screen and Sara in the other, and at times they pass into each other’s space, leaving their box and moving into the other person’s, and there are also times where it opens up into the entire space,” Sinopoli said. The score for the work weaves together poetry by Pierre Joris, read by the author, with percussion composed by Joel Chadabe.
The company’s newest member, Emily Gunter, joins Robles and Senecal in “Auriga,” premiered in 2017 at the Massry Center for the Arts at the College of Saint Rose, and set to music by local composer Andrew Mckenna Lee. In this dance, the performers wear masks and are filmed together within the same frame.
For “Slipping Through,” Sinopoli used the rhythm and syncopation of the Byron score as inspiration for a work that moves between sharp, quick changes and a feeling of looseness—“moments when the body sort of melts a little bit,” as the choreographer put it.
Much of the new dance she has seen over the last six months “is related to the seriousness of where we are right now and the fear and solitude,” Sinopoli said. “I was trying to create the possibility of still having an interconnectedness. When you capture the essence of the movement and the essence of the physicality, it’s no longer a problem that you’re trying to solve, it’s just a different way of saying something.”