Pushing Forward, With Momentum

Momentum X leads off this season and asks our audience and our choreographers to look at our dancers from many angles. Why not try to change your perception? Step into a view that may be uncomfortable and perhaps disconcerting. The result just may be a new way of seeing—an amplified conception. Enjoy the change and bring your openness and willingness to the rest of our season. 

Our Momentum series has always been about pushing the boundaries, and looking at what's hot in fresh, young, choreographic talent. This year we bring three choreographers and three world premieres to the stage Labor Day weekend, and they each shared a little behind their piece and how it fit into the Momentum method. 

Nicole Corea, in constructing her piece, takes a long piece of fabric—inspired by a tattoo on her back that is based on the native American medicine wheel centering around the number four. This number refers to the four seasons and what they represent in life, and the four parts of us that make us complete as a person (physical, emotional, mental and spiritual) and how our will is what drives us to finding the wholeness. The fabric, then, represents the things that thread us together.

Julie Niekrasz imagined a metaphorical wall separating the two Momentum stages (which are weaving around existing columns in an expansive turn-of-the-century hall.) She has the dancers immediately curious about the wall. She see walls within ourselves and between other people. in the second movement pas de deux, after the individuals touch, the wall then vanishes, a metaphor for our human story.

Gabe Masson and musician Scott Detweiler are both originally from New Orleans. Naturally they both have discussed their need to dig more deeply into their feelings post Katrina. Gabe thinks the residents of New Orleans were forced into a place of "necessary intimacy" when Katrina struck. All lines of division in daily life—race, class, etc.—were all of a sudden blurred and people had to go "beneath the surface," as it were, to (re)discover their humanity. 

The range of music throughout the three pieces ranges from classical to new age to original acoustic blues, and the range of emotions is just as wide. With the audience seated all around the stage, we'll have to be open not just to the experience, but to each other.