KT Nelson to unveil new work at Grace Cathedral
Christian penitents have walked the arduous pilgrimage path across northern Spain to the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela for more than a thousand years. It’s a deeply personal undertaking and a public profession, a quietly awesome spectacle and a test of spirit, an inner voyage and a gregarious celebration on foot. In other words, this demanding ritual is a human drama brimming with dynamic ingredients ripe for a keeneyed choreographer.
In the summer of 2016, KT Nelson, co-artistic director and one of three resident choreographers at ODC/Dance Company, spent a month with her husband traversing a lesser-traveled pilgrimage route to Santiago. (“I only met two Americans,” she says.) It wasn’t religious faith that drew her to Spain. Rather, it was the siren song of “Path of Miracles,” a soaring multilingual work by English composer Joby Talbot.
“Everybody does it for different reasons,” Nelson says. “There are a lot of people who have loss, who are dealing with difficulties. There are youth who are on a cheap vacation. That’s what’s great about it, there’s not a singular intent. I think they are all devoted or dedicated, but coming from many different angles.”
Nelson was turned on to Talbot’s “Path of Miracles” by its 2005 premiere by conductor Nicole Paiement, founder and artistic director of San Francisco’s Opera Parallèle. While
on the Camino de Santiago, she decided that Talbot’s piece provided an ideal score to explore the pilgrimage experience. Joined by San Francisco’s 17-member vocal ensemble Volti, conducted by Robert Geary, ODC/Dance will premiere Nelson’s “Path of Miracles” at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral on Feb. 9 and 10 as part of the company’s 47th season.
“I think the score is the core of the production,” Nelson says. “And to realize the score, I felt it was essential to put it in the right place. This music belongs in the cathedral, and I like Grace because it’s the right architecture, and they do a lot of programming that’s open to the community at large.”
In many ways, the diversity she found on her journey is echoed in Talbot’s music, which features a libretto in Greek, Latin, Spanish, Basque,
French, English and German by Robert Dickinson, who draws on Roman Catholic liturgy and medieval texts such as the Codex Calixtinus. With four movements named after cities on the pilgrimage route (Roncesvalles, Burgos, León and Santiago), the score reaches far beyond the Western canon, opening with an indigenous Taiwanese chant — “a celestial note that lasts for three minutes,” Nelson says. “He’s trying to get beyond the traditional origins.”
The ODC dancers perform in various parts of the cathedral, while the Volti vocalists also move around the majestic space. Nelson hopes the audience’s self-directed experience of the immersive site-specific work will evoke the way pilgrims “flop back and forth between being alone and being with others.
“I’m trying not to get in the way of the music,” she says. “I’m trying to be simple choreographically because the music is plenty complex and big. I may even have several audience members control some of the dancers, because I want the audience to feel as close to the score as possible.”
The Nelson work will be performed 7:30 p.m. Feb. 9 and 10 at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral (tickets $40 at odc.dance/miracles).
ODC/Dance’s season continues March 15-18 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, with the world premiere of ODC founder and artistic director Brenda Way’s “News of the World,” featuring music by Oscar-nominated composer David Lang and mise-en-scène by set designer Alexander V. Nichols and New York-based painter Doug Argue, responding
to Picasso’s seminal modernist 1907 painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.”
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Zoë Klein’s autobiographical acrobatic and aerial dance piece “Born, Never Asked” premieres at San Francisco’s Dance Mission Theater Feb. 2-4. Drawing on her experience with international adoption — she was born in Colombia and grew up with her adopted family in Brooklyn — she has created a searching work for a cast of dancers from immigrant backgrounds: Andrey Pfening, Jeremy Vik, Hien Huynh and Olivas Xedex Renee.
While Klein has been investigating the adoption experience through dance since college, she credits a five-month CounterPulse Artist Residency & Commissioning Program with enabling her to greatly
deepen her work.
“I got 100 hours in the studio and a tremendous amount of support,” she says. “I got to really take the time to ask the questions: How do you take acrobatic imagery and dance and … make this more serious? I got to start to invent a genre where dance and acrobatics can articulate meaning more than entertainment. Adoption is a beautiful, complicated identity. To be adopted is to have to constantly juggle many tensions and loyalties, where we’re coming from and where we’re going to. I’m using the process of working with my dancers to find the next questions.”
“Born, Never Asked” will be performed 8 p.m. Feb. 2 and 3 and 7 p.m. Feb. 4 at San Francisco’s Dance Mission Theater (tickets $18-$25 at 800838-3006 or zoekleinproductions.com).