Artists on their feet to get bodies in seats
Live dance has been a hard sell for decades, and it’s getting harder.
But artists can’t help themselves: They’ve gotta do what they’ve gotta do, declining audiences or not.
While some Houston choreographers are carving niches for themselves outside traditional theater spaces to attract new viewers, the fall season begins this week with shows by two companies that are looking for inventive ways to bring more people into the black box, through wildly different approaches.
The new Group Acorde looks daring in its resistance to flashy stage effects, focused instead on process and substance.
“We believe in it, and we believe in something different,” said dancer/choreographer Roberta Paixao Cortes, one of the four founders. “Sometimes we’re very clear what that difference is, and sometimes we’re exploring.”
She and Lindsey McGill, both classically trained contemporary dancers, collaborate throughout the creative process with their musical co-founders, bassist Thomas Helton and saxophonist Seth Paynter, to push the relationship and find their own language.
“It’s not like someone writing new music, and a month later we make a dance to it,” Cortes said. Group Acorde’s first evening-length show, “Unemojional,” examines the influence of technology on human communication, but the production itself is not high-tech, and it’s staged in a deliberately intimate venue, the Rec Room. Each of the core members, plus guest artist Anat Grigorio, created a piece for the show based on the theme. Paynter and Helton are beginning to work with video projections as well as sound.
Though the company’s creative process may sound heady, its founders still want the work to be “relatable.”
“I can’t tell you how many times people have come up to me after shows I’ve done in the past and said, ‘I don’t get it,’ ” Cortes said. “We have to be smart in how we convey our message and create a space where people are comfortable.”
For McGill, a sense of humanity is the essential connection. “It starts with who we are as people and artists, and our craft,” she said. “The best product comes from you and what you’re good at.”
Dionne and Andy Noble bring a different perspective: As professors at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, they nurture emerging dancers and choreographers who need to be able to find jobs when they graduate.
Their NobleMotion Dance Company, made up of area professionals, has built its reputation by giving performers obstacles to overcome. Its works often utilize technology-driven special effects and Cirque-style gymnastics (the hottest route to a dance career in the early-21st century).
NobleMotion recently won a prestigious arts innovation grant from the Mid-America Arts Council to pursue this kind of work — and take it to the community with an outreach program.
“It’s the evolution of dance,” Andy Noble said. “Dancers have to be able to switch gears. In some ways, I’m a purist. But this is about how we can push choreography and the physicality of dance and give audiences something they haven’t seen before.”
The company has some great ringers for a few seasons in Jared Doster and Victoria DeRenzo, returning professionals in Sam Houston’s graduate program. The couple met as performers with the legendary touring company Pilobolus.
Doster was a founding member of NobleMotion during his undergrad years in Huntsville, when he double-majored in dance and industrial development and design. Now, his design talents figure as prominently as his dancing in NobleMotion’s “Catapult” program: He created the five major sets for the show’s dances, including a contraption of doors that flip end over end and a rotating device the dancers nicknamed “the deathcopter.”
Noble describes some of the sets as “art installations with movement inside.”
“They’re everyday structures, M.C. Escher-ed a bit,” he said. “This show would be impossible to do without the sets. They’ve forced us to think about movement, changes in gravity and momentum.”
Doster said the ideas for the works all came from the Nobles; he just brought the structures to life. The deathcopter, a machine with special bearings that allow it to spin freely, was partly inspired by old turnstile windmills and stone mills. The dancers ride and fly through the air on it. A tunnel-shaped set for Dionne Noble’s “Aorta” requires the performers to interact with concave walls.
Frequent collaborator David Deveau, a lighting and effects wiz, helped with several of the show’s works, including “Ziggurat,” the deathcopter piece. “Aorta” features sound and lighting design by Bryan Ealey.
Some of the sets weigh more than 200 pounds, so move-in for the “Catapult” program will be a new challenge in itself for the company. NobleMotion has been rehearsing at Sam Houston’s theater, which is available to it for free; the sets will be transported in a large truck to the Hobby Center.
Before each night’s show, young dancers from NobleMotion’s community-outreach program will perform in the lobby, using structures they built with help from Houston architect Eric Arnold.
They’re solving some of the same movement issues the professionals have tackled. Look for some of them on the main stage in a few years.