Great Friends Meeting House, Newport, RI.
July 17, 2024.
There I was again: sitting on the lawn at Newport, RI’s Great Friends Meeting House, enjoying live music while awaiting that night’s Newport Dance Festival program. It’s one of my favorite parts of each summer in this beach resort town, just people gathered together outdoors to enjoy concert dance. No pretensions, just collaboration and community. I even came upon some old family friends right before the show this year, and ended up sitting with them for the show.
New dancers came to the stage before the Meeting House, others returned; new works filled the stage, others I got to enjoy again. Solos and duets had energy bursting from the proscenium just as much as large ensembles. There was a notable multiplicity to the works presented, but they also all came together to be something cohesive. Those threads of collaboration and community – and simply being great art – brought it all together.
Apart from the below, also taking the stage were Mark Harootian’s Steady Grip (2024), from Newport Contemporary Ballet, and Deanna Gerde’s Hydrae (2023), through the Rhode Island Women’s Choreography Project – which I’ve previously reviewed. Steady Grip was the same cogently crafted work as it was a few months ago, and the cast performed it with just as much command and heart. I think it may have impacted me more on that first viewing, in a more intimate stage setting (I was much closer to the performers) and with more controlled lighting. It goes to show how those contextual ingredients can affect how one experiences live art.
Hydrae was the same work that I remembered, but it was intriguing to see it through a different cast (including some Newport Contemporary Ballet dancers). They brought the former cast’s same passion – the same tender balance of ferocity and sensitivity that the work seems to call for – but also their own authenticity. Gerde has a unique kinetic perceptiveness, and I look forward to seeing where she takes her choreographic work (as a Newport Contemporary Ballet company dancer, she is also an accomplished performer).
Beginning the program was a work from students of The Academy at Newport Contemporary Ballet, in Lisa Bibeau’s Convergence. Wearing flowy pink dresses adorned with dainty flowers (by Eileen Stoops), they danced largely classical vocabulary with sweet elegance. A few sharper accents added a little spice to that sweetness. Something more electronica peppered the score (from Zoe Keating) – and my mind then went to something more modern, more forward-looking. Their generation is our future, after all – of the art form and far, far beyond it. Pointedly, almost as a reminder of that, in one moment they gazed right at us.
Then came Conga pa’ cerrar, a delightful solo from Newport Contemporary Ballet company dancer Edgardo Torres Estremera. With equal parts zippy Latin dance footwork, balletic shapes and jazzy turns, it was a vibrant mish-mash of various dance forms. The work also demonstrated how with enough energy and intention, one dancer can fill up a stage just as much as a large ensemble. All considered, it also felt fitting for the open-air summer atmosphere at hand: casual, welcoming, and plain fun.
Leah Russell and Rhea Keller’s highly satisfying Interwoven switched tone by bringing something more postmodern to the stage, yet joy and ease stayed right there. With dance seeming to get faster and faster these days, it was refreshing to see them find slower possibilities within the score’s myriad rhythmic layers (from James Blackshaw). It also warmed my heart to see Keller, formerly with Newport Contemporary Ballet, back dancing at the Great Friends Meeting House.
Now dancing in Seattle, it feels to me like Keller has found a collaborator in Russell with a similarly keen kinetic sense and beautifully unassuming vision. Two bodies moving — giving and taking weight, dancing through aligned yet individual pathways, finding and leaving behind eye contact — that can be more than enough to captivate. This duet was a clear Exhibit A.
Artistic and Executive Director Danielle Genest’s Blind Witness followed, filling the atmosphere with something more mysterious and thought-provoking. As is typical of her work, various dancers’ strengths came together into a unified whole. The ensemble engaged with the score’s pulsing mantra in various ways, creating dynamic musicality.
Movement motifs – such covering and uncovering eyes, gestures of reaching toward and sometimes past another – built a sense of recognition and perception…or the lack thereof. Eileen Stoops’s black and white costumes enhanced that sense of light and shadow, of the seen and unseen. Genest structured the work such that we could experience all of these elements through various groupings of dancers – each of them therefore fresh and unique.
Even with the abstraction at hand, my hand began to race with intriguing questions – all of them malleable and generative. Who is and isn’t present to witness? How do they witness? Why do they witness? To end the work, the dancers reached past each other in a clump, then stepped away toward the wings – eyes first covered, then open. Potentially rich with myriad avenues of meaning, it’s an ending that I think will stick with me for some time.
Mad Skin, from Chicago-based Visceral Dance, bursted with passion and a certain freneticism. Nick Pupillo choreographed the work, and Nia Davis and Morgan Williams performed it. In its sweeping, emotive score (from Mac Quale) and in its structure, the work felt like a classical ballet pas de deux. Yet, bold and inventive partnering, serpentine pathways of spine and hips, and deep grounding into the stage had it feeling like something much less traditional. As an intimate exchange between two bodies, two souls, the work underscored how – lacking words in this art form – that exchange could mean countless things within the eye of the beholder.
Joshua L. Peugh’s Slump, danced by Newport Contemporary Ballet,closed out the night with a splash of lighthearted fun. Even while tightly structured and clean, Peugh’s movement vocabulary and staging built an atmosphere of party antics; anything goes, anything could happen. Shoulder-shimmying and hip-shaking, the dancers met the energy and size of the big band Klezmer score (Klezmer Juice). Brilliant theatricality topped it all off to really make the party come to life. Like in any such setting, many little moments played out: of joy, annoyance, of desire, of exhaustion (hence the title).
With another score from Ella Fitzgerald, and with ’50s-era costumes (from Stoops and Carol Poole), the work also felt grounded in history. Like in Mad Skin, however, the dancers’ channeling of momentum and inventive vocabulary made the work feel much more contemporary than classical. When people come together to create, any confluence of qualities and choices can blossom into something profound…or even simply entertaining (and that’s worthwhile, too).
When other people then come together to take in whatever that is, any number of experiences are also possible – whether that be in a fancy theater or on a lush summer lawn. Thank you to Newport Contemporary Ballet and all collaborators for making this year’s edition of the latter just as special as ever. I’m already looking forward to next year!
By Kathryn Boland of Dance Informa.
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