Embracing a ‘Rite’
Choreographer takes on classic with young cast, twists
Imagine what going to the theater would be like if audiences today reacted as fervently to unfamiliar music and choreography as they did in Paris in 1913, when the Ballets Russes premiered “The Rite of Spring.”
Based on a pagan ritual and ending with an image of a human sacrifice, the piece featuring Igor Stravinsky’s thunderous score and Vaslav Nijinsky’s stomping modern dance caused such an uproar, it’s said that the performers couldn’t hear each other, and impressario Sergei Diaghilev tried to calm people by flashing the house lights.
Despite the rough debut, it has aged well.
The “Rite of Spring” remains a powerful and seminal work of art, now a rite of passage for choreographers. Among many notable productions, two of the most widely regarded are the late Pina Bausch’s epic-scale approach and a riveting solo by Molissa Fenley.
“How do you take such a huge work and put your spin on it — honoring what Stravinsky and Nijinsky did, and trying something new?” said Laura Gutierrez, one of Houston’s most adventurous young choreographers.
Though she embraces challenge, Gutierrez never would have ventured to do a “Rite,” especially so early in her career, if her friend Matt Hune hadn’t asked her to help create a version to inaugurate the Rec Room’s first season.
Hune wanted to stage “Rite” in the Rec Room’s intimate, windowless Back Room, which accommodates an audience of only about 20 people along the walls of the downtown venue. He wants viewers to feel involved with the ritual, although they won’t actually participate.
The six dancers all have connections to Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, where Hune teaches: Amy Oden graduated in 2014; Emma Singleton, Sarah Gowdy and Amelia Hernandez just graduated; and Maya Parker and Claire Dominic-Smith are still students. Stage manager Timely Rain, assistant stage manager Isabella Eleuterius and costume designer Maegan Fahy are also recent HSPVA grads.
Hune and Gutierrez didn’t set out to cast such young, pre-professional dancers, but a number showed up for the audition. Hune knew he wanted to “blow up” the whole pagan theme to reflect 21st-century America. Appealingly, the young women, in their real lives, are all on the verge of a next phase.
Hune appreciates the rawness that could bring to performances in such close quarters. “We see these characters — or whoever they are — under a microscope, really intimately engaged with each other at a level that’s not about technique necessarily,” he said.
Gutierrez treated them like professionals, starting with a journaling exercise to help them explore their emotions. Before they got too deep into choreography, each dancer wrote a paragraph explaining how she felt about being a young woman in America today. Gutierrez coaxed them to share their responses, which were deeply personal.
The dynamic she is achieving showed in the dancers’ intense expressions during a recent rehearsal. Gutierrez has let some of the movement run its course, offering prompts such as, “Give me a super-angry gesture.”
Her style is minimal — a post-modern evolution of Nijinsky’s movement. But she’s just as interested in the space itself, using every reachable inch of the room. Sometimes the dancers walk in concert or tumble together across the floor with their legs locked. Then they go separate ways, or lift each other, or slam into walls.
“It’s been fun to watch because it’s been unfolding as this sisterhood or something,” Gutierrez said. “There’s a story that’s naturally unfolding, with the space and with the ladies.”
Gutierrez climbed these same walls, which include brick ledges, recently during “Back Room,” her duet with Houston Ballet soloist Chun Wai Chan. She’s trying not to repeat herself.
“It’s hard because there’s only so much you can do in a small space,” she said. “But I’m focusing on the six women and how, architecturally, they fit in. It’s quite different than just two people.”
The music is Stravinsky’s, with a twist — a recording by the Minneapolis jazz trio Bad Plus.
And Gutierrez was not tempted to cast herself in the piece, and couldn’t be, anyway: She has to miss the performances for betterpaying work as a dancer with Jonah Bokaer’s acclaimed modern company.
She has toured with Bokaer, on and off, for about five years, ever since she was drafted on short notice to help with his piece “Eclipse,” during the first Counter-Current festival at the University of Houston. They’ll perform soon at Philip Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut, then take Bokaer’s popular “Rules of the Game” (a collaboration with Pharrell Williams and visual artist Daniel Arsham) to the Jacob’s Pillow Festival and Serbia.
Gutierrez will be home for about five minutes, then off again to teach in North Carolina. She expects to have a residency in Illinois in August, and she has a show after that at the Center for Performance Research (founded by Bokaer and John Jasperse) in Brooklyn, N.Y.
This is how a successful, independent dancer-choreographer really makes a go of it in Houston: by leaving.
“Rite of Spring” could be the last piece Gutierrez creates in her hometown for a while. She thinks all the time, reluctantly, about moving — leaving her home, her family, her partner and a city she loves — even though she’s had free studio space as one of six resident artists of the Rec Room.
Residencies are “super important” for freelancers with production budgets of less than $5,000 — “or no budget at all,” she said. “But in order for me to stay inspired and keep pushing myself, I have to constantly leave.”
At 29, she, too, feels as if she’s on the cusp of change, like the dancers of “Rite of Spring.” She needs to dance while she can, but she loves creating choreography just as much. Maybe even more.
“That scares me,” she said. “There’s a magic in it that’s unlike any other.”
Cue the Stravinsky.
‘There’s a story that’s naturally unfolding, with the space and with the ladies.’
Laura Gutierrez, choreographer