We attend an ODC rehearsal at Grace Cathedral.
Brenda Way waxes philosophical about ODC/Dance’s upcoming season.
“I think this is our season of heaven and hell,” says the artistic director, who founded the influential modern dance company in 1971. Way and Co-Artistic Director KT Nelson claimed opposing spheres when creating their world premieres for this year’s edition of Dance Around Town, as ODC’s home season is called.
“She gets the heaven part,” Way says of Nelson, whose immersive “Path of Miracles” premieres on Friday, Feb. 9, at Grace Cathedral. Way, on the other hand, will grapple with current events in “News of the World,” premiering in March at YBCA Theater.
“I think we’re both trying to figure out how to speak to the world, how to express ourselves about what matters,” says Nelson. Her “Path” shares its inspiration and name with a 2005 choral work by British composer Joby Talbot, who has collaborated with choreographers Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon. Performed a cappella by 17 singers, “Path” describes the Camino de Santiago, the ancient Catholic pilgrimage across Northern Spain.
“The first movement is the enthusiasm that anybody has before they start a journey,” Nelson said by phone. “The second is about the wall that everybody hits on the Camino, physically and psychologically — walking 15 to 20 miles a day, every day, does that to you.” The third movement describes a breakthrough to serenity, and the fourth celebrates completion and enlightenment.
“It is the ultimate metaphor,” says Robert Geary, founder and artistic director of San Francisco’s Volti vocal ensemble, which will perform live. “When you take a breath, you take a journey. A lifetime can be thought of that way.”
Nelson first heard Talbot’s score in 2015 and was transported. So much so, she says, “I thought that if I was to understand it, I should do the pilgrimage.” So in 2016, she and her husband did a six-week trek on the Camino Del Norte route. It was revelatory in a way that Nelson didn’t expect. “As terrible as our times are,” she says, “I’m trusting the goodness of people. I have felt it, I felt it on the Camino. That is fundamentally reassuring to me.”
Thousands of people, from devout Christians to agnostic seekers, do the Camino each year, and “Path’s” lyrics reflect that diversity. Excerpted from the 12th century Codex Calixtinus and medieval liturgy, the lyrics are sung in Basque, English, French, German, Greek and Latin.
Cross-cultural art like Nelson’s dovetails with Grace’s mission, says the cathedral’s dean, Malcolm Clemens Young. “I don’t look at the world in terms of secular versus sacred,” he says. “Sometimes we need people like artists to help us see the beauty and uniqueness of what may seem ordinary to us otherwise.”
“Path” starts in the Grace choir and migrates throughout the space. The audience is limited to under 200 people (sold out three weeks in advance, and there is an online wait list), five of whom will be included in the performance, as will the Volti singers. “For us choir people,” Geary says, “working with a group of dancers like ODC, opens up our world in whole new dimensions.”
Nelson hopes the same will be true for the audience.
“I wanted the experience of the music to be intimate, inside it,” she says. “I feel that the score is the spirit of the Camino, and if I want people to understand it, they need to be near it.”
Way is taking a more temporal and topical approach to “News of the World, which has music by Oscar-nominated composer David Lang. Her 2017 piece “What We Carry, What We Keep” shares the bill.
Between presidential shenanigans, #MeToo and immigration, she’s had plenty of material to work from, and daily headlines are Way’s jumping-off points. “I’m looking to find circumstances that are evocative of the complexity of our relationships,” she says. For example, “A woman is doing a very self-contained solo. I have a man running around (her) in circles, getting closer and closer. What is the unsettling effect for men of a woman who has her power in hand? It’s quite abstract, but it’s resonant.”
Way’s own cross-genre inspiration is David Argue’s painting “Footfalls Echo in the Memory,” a palimpsest of Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”; set designer Alexander V. Nichols will further deconstruct it to create scenery. “I realized that Doug’s version of Picasso’s disruptive/transgressive imagery of women in a brothel — painted in 1907, the year that Harriot Stanton Blatch formed the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women — was an appropriate foil for a focus on women in our contemporary world,” Way said via email.
Both women’s ambitious works take on multivalent subjects challenging to render in movement. But, Way says, their common theme is humanity making sense of itself: “It comes down to relations between human beings. Dance, being made up of people, is always about relationships. If the body speaks in a compelling way, it ought to be able to pull you in.”