The ‘coolest’ dance is born from personal insight
A modern-dance choreographer sometimes needs a vocabulary as inventive as her steps.
This is how a shakeybrakey moment in Jane Weiner’s newest piece came to be known among the rehearsing performers as “Martha doing ‘Flashdance.’ ” As in, Martha Graham meets Jennifer Beal.
A wiggle that followed, Weiner said with a mischievous grin, was most definitely a twerk. And there was a hand-grabbing-the-air gesture she called “mosquito.”
Weiner’s site-specific, hour-long dance, “coolest news on planet earth, chapter 2,” debuts Thursday. It’s built around, and inspired by, the colorful “Crêpe Paper Carpet” sculpture at Moody Center for the Arts.
Rehearsals were far enough along last Tuesday that Weiner no longer needed to name the motions within a segment in which the dancers crane their necks like howling coyotes to the chorus of Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy.” And they were down with the finger puppet pointing.
Building a section to a song by the B-52s, Weiner created steps thoughtfully but rapidly, maybe 15 seconds of material at a time. There was no piddling over details; mostly the dancers just followed what she did and picked it up instantly, knowing they still had another week to finesse things.
Weiner’s current group — Jacquelyne Boe, Joshua DeAlba, La’Rodney Freeman, Kelsey Gibbs, Rachael Hutto, Travis Prokop, Donald Sayre, Candace Tompkins and Brit Wallis (the lone veteran) — are roughly the third or fourth generation of Weiner’s Hope Stone Dance Company.
But those familiar with Weiner’s work will recognize the mix of body types, from very tall to very short, thin to fullerbodied, and also ethnically diverse, a look she initially borrowed from New York greats Bill T. Jones and Doug Elkins (with whom she performed early in her career).
“I love the way all different types of body parts move,” she said. “It goes back to, we’re all artists, and everybody should be dancing, not just tall, thin Balanchine blonds.”
Weiner’s base of operations has changed drastically, though. It’s been four years since she shuttered the Montrose studio that had been her thriving, crowded hub for more than a decade. She was just a week shy of signing a lease on a larger space and embarking on a capital campaign to support it when she let it all go.
“To make a profit, we would have had to keep three studios full,” she said. “All of a sudden, I saw my life as a studio owner, losing touch with the art and outreach. So much money was going into the edifice.”
The less tangible work of “mindful arts education” will be her legacy instead. With Hope Stone Inc.’s teaching programs at schools, she has long brought quality dance education to kids of all ages and socio-economic backgrounds, seeing the arts as an essential form of problem-solving that can be applied even to math and science.
Hope Stone Inc. also has a program that connects teenagers and senior citizens, and the professional Hope Stone company performs regularly for students through the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts’ Discovery Series.
Weiner no longer feels obligated to stage a full season of public performances for her company as she once did. She’s not alone in that respect: Small dance companies seem to wax and wane like the moon in Houston, but they’ve been waning for nearly a decade now.
Companies just can’t gain enough audience traction to support frequent regular programs of shows at theaters. Sitespecific works, often at outdoor or unconventional venues, have become more the norm. Hope Stone will perform one site-specific show in November within Havel Ruck Project’s “Ripple” installation at Cherryhurst House and revive an older piece from its repertoire in March at a new alternative space called the Interchange.
Weiner’s newest piece is her second at the Moody, following a one-night show within last season’s Mickalene Thomas installation that was a kind of first date. This time around, Moody director Alison Weaver invited Weiner to “lab” her work on site for two weeks; and “coolest news” runs for six performances across two more weeks.
Weiner relishes any creative time with her performers, but the center’s natural-light-filled, wide-open central gallery — “drool city,” she said. “I could live there.”
Months ago, when Weaver invited Weiner to activate the space around a commission for the first U.S. installation by art collective We Make Carpets, neither knew what shape the sculpture might take —only that it would involve the crêpe paper used for piñatas and might be rectangular. Dutch artists Marcia Nolte, Stijn Van der Vleuten and Bob Waardenburg base their pieces on local materials but don’t arrive with a preconceived plan. Their creation process involves intuitive, laborintensive marathons of several weeks.
“It could have been all over the floor,” Weiner said.
“Crêpe Paper Carpet” turned out to be a wall, roughly 20 feet long, composed of 65,000 sheets of the tissuelike material that’s folded and stacked into a pattern suggesting an intricately woven friendship bracelet. A very nice, two-sided background for dance.
The wall, of course, references the whole border mess that distresses many Americans. Weiner, who has felt devastated by the impact of current government policies on migrant children, started planning the dance by considering music about walls. Pink Floyd came to mind, naturally.
But a hopeful spirit and a strong sense of the inherent goodness in people has always been a key part of her DNA. (Note the name of her company.)
Ultimately, she decided to go deeper, creating something more personal than political. She asked herself, “What is it that separates us one from the other, and how do we get to the other side of these emotional and spiritual walls with people who don’t think like us?”
Examining her own interior walls and prejudices, she wanted to somehow reach a better side of herself and find mental serenity. “We’re all bones,” she said. “Without the skin and hair, you can’t tell if a person is black or white, straight or gay, Democrat or Republican.”
She loves working with her dancers at the Moody Center so much, she has taken to calling “Crêpe Paper Carpet” the fiesta wall.
“It feels like a party when we’re here,” she said.