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Outside the comfort zone Choreographer takes modern dance away from traditional stage
Margaret Lewis wasn’t getting the “arch backwards while rolling over with your neck against your partner’s neck” thing.
A tall, willowy redhead, she also worried about hitting her arms on the antique chandelier above the aisle of the Heritage Society’s 1891 St. John Church.
Brittny Bush, bending forward beneath Lewis, looked only slightly more confident.
Choreographer Lydia Hance then coaxed the performers patiently through a bigger, sweeping move with lush, open arms.
“You have to have energy through the fingertips,” Hance said, extending her
arms elegantly to demonstrate.
Her advice was a revelation: The dancers’ movement improved immediately.
“It makes a huge difference when you have that spacious confidence coming from the back,” Hance said. “Good job!”
Lewis and Bush aren’t dancers by training. They’re among four actors playing reverends in Horse Head Theatre’s new immersive production of Young Jean Lee’s 2007 play “Church,” which opens Friday at downtown’s Sam Houston Park.
Standing nearby, Alli Villines, another of the reverends, looked relieved that all she had to do was sing and play Greg Cotes’ original songs on her ukelele.
Hance, with her goodgirl aura, does not appear to be the kind of person who enjoys pushing others beyond their comfort zones. She’s calm, studious, sweet, quiet.
But she’s built her reputation with site work, taking modern dance where it may be least expected — into places such as the downtown tunnels, in U-Haul trucks and on MetroRail trains, where she hopes to interrupt or bedazzle onlookers and somehow “normalize” dance for people who might not normally go to theaters.
Sometimes her work makes viewers uncomfortable enough to push dancers out of the way or yell at them to stop. (On the light rail, one woman accused a dancer who was clad in a deliberately unsexy costume of trying to seduce her boyfriend.)
Like other passionate choreographers, Hance wants to keep her art form relevant in a world where theaters and dance productions are competing against screens for people’s time and attention.
Believing firmly in the magic of live performance, she usually collaborates with artists in other disciplines, especially composers. For the past six years, Hance has hosted an annual competition for new music. It’s become an international open call and yielded more than 200 song submissions.
The competition has been such a success Hance feels guilty about not getting to use more of the music she has received.
After this year, she will make it a biennial, so she can do justice to the pieces selected, Hance said. “I’m not in the business of asking people to submit for no reason.”
She regularly makes dance for film, focusing on brief works that can be shared on social media, also applying her own 30-something life in other ways her generation can appreciate.
One example: After Hance become a mother 14 months ago, she started a “babywearing” dance class at Houston Metropolitan Dance Center that encourages mothers to move with their infants strapped to their chests. When her son, Micah, got a little too big to carry around that way, she started a class for toddlers.
In some ways, “Church” brings Hance full circle.
A California Bay Area native with dance and English literature degrees from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Hance landed her first dancing job in Houston about a decade ago with Randall Flinn’s praise dance company, Ad Deum. She soon found her own voice with more abstract, minimal movement, founding Frame Dance Productions in 2010.
Because “Church” director Jacey Little wants everything about this production to feel authentic, Hance has recently had to think hard about what, exactly, defines “spiritual” dance.
“I think it’s the intention,” she said. “You’re not performing for the audience. You’re reflecting what’s going on outside of you and leading and engaging those around you.”
That doesn’t come naturally to her, and she’s nervous about getting the tone right.
“I’m often making movement now from a cerebral place, not the heart and not narrative,” Hance said. “This project has been an opportunity to find the physicality of joy, a way to make something celebratory and hopeful.”
“Church” unfolds as an exuberant sermon delivered by an eccentric, traveling congregation of reverends who sing, dance and give testimony. During this highly politicized era, intense Christianity can be polarizing, but Lee’s script aims to appeal to believers and nonbelievers alike.
Hance, for what it’s worth, is a practicing Presbyterian.
She and Little hope to collaborate again on an original production. “Church,” with its fiveminute dance, was a test run of their artistic compatibility, Little said. Lee’s original production had a lively and virtuosic trio.
“Interpreting stage directions is up for grabs, and our third reverend is a musician,” Little said. “We thought it might be more powerful to have two actors do a more intimate duet. The other two are incorporated at the end, but this is less of a modern dance than (in) the original production. We’re letting the actors’ strengths, personalities and emotional journeys — especially where they are in the course of the play — shine through.”
Hance’s next project could take her back to the streets, although she hasn’t yet settled on a location. She has received a Houston Arts Alliance grant to produce “Blue Shift,” an interactive, immersive dance about the evolution of romantic correspondence — from handwritten love letters to texting. The music is by three composers who entered her competition. One lives in Finland, one is at Cornell University, and one is from Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music.
In the meantime, Hance travels to West Texas this week for a Dance Ranch Marfa workshop with the national collective Lower Left. She’s also mulling over how to develop her personal summer challenge into something larger.
She doesn’t perform much herself these days, but Hance gave herself an intense 30-day project — “Daily Dances” — filming only small portions of her moving body each day, in 10-second bits she posts on Instagram.
“It’s about how you can play with negative space and with movement in a frame,” she said. “I’m more on the minimal and subtle end of the spectrum. More visual than kinesthetic. Not into running, jumping and leaping.”
She likes to create movement that visually dissects bodies, built on quadrants that she asks dancers to mix and match.
“They’re often running around the studio carrying pieces of paper so they can remember the parts,” she said. “Maybe the whole body is too much for me too handle. Or maybe it’s a desire for vulnerability and closeness.”