‘7 Deadly Sins’ tempts audiences
As a choreographer, Frances Smith Cohen is first and foremost a storyteller.
The founding artistic director of Center Dance Ensemble has created interpretations of such classic tales as “Dracula,” “Snow Queen,” “La Llorona” and “Hamlet.” For her latest modern-dance ballet, she returns to the Shakespearian well with “The 7th Deadly Sin,” an adaption of “Othello.”
“I’ve been wanting to do it for many years, but there was a classic that José Limón did called ‘The Moor’s Pavane,’ so nobody would touch the theme, because it was the epitome of what a modern interpretation of ‘Othello’ would be,” she says. “But it’s been more than 60 years, so I thought, what the heck.”
Cohen’s translation is a loose one. It will be performed in contemporary dress, including a touch of soldierly camouflage. The basic story is the same — the evil Iago schemes to convince the heroic Othello
Othello’s tragic flaw, of course, is pride. That explains the title, which, in turn, inspired the theme for Center Dance’s fall concert, “The 7 Deadly Sins.” Four of these so-called capital vices will be represented by excerpts from past repertoire, while associate artistic director Diane McNeal Hunt has created two short pieces for the sins of envy and greed.
The latter is titled “The Game” and uses a series of 18-inch wooden cubes as a visual metaphor for the accumulation of wealth and power. The piece on envy, titled “One and the Same,” is a duet featuring company dancer Amber Robins and guest performer Nicole Olson. It’s a meditation on body image as the two dancers quite literally size each other up and find themselves lacking.
“It’s a typical woman thing, and it is very much a dancer thing,” says Olson, who just finished up her 10th straight year starring as the Queen of the Klan in Scorpius Dance Theatre’s “A Vampire Tale.”
“There isn’t a heck of a lot of eye contact in the piece, because it’s not really acknowledging each other, it’s acknowledging what we’re seeing and watching and coveting.”
For a couple of the deadly sins, Cohen acknowledges to making a bit of a conceptual stretch.
“I couldn’t figure out how to show gluttony without having somebody eating something,” he says.
Her solution? Bringing back her scene from “Dracula” where the vampire brides sink their fangs into the helpless Jonathan Harker.
“It’s totally tongue in cheek,” she says. “I didn’t want it all to be ‘deadly.’ It had to have some humor and some lightness to it.”