Epic proportions
Four hours, 19 performers, and a choreographer's reflections on decades of dance
 A rehearsal of Sara Rudner's "Dancing-on-View" at the Institute of Contemporary Art. (Essdras M. Suarez/Globe Staff) |
The windows of the Institute of Contemporary Art's theater frame an image of calm serenity, with boats slowly gliding by in the harbor beneath a crystalline blue sky. But inside is a flurry of activity, as Summer Stages Dance artist-in-residence Sara Rudner focuses on the daunting task of putting together a four-hour marathon dance installation. "Dancing-on-View: The ICA Variations" will be staged tomorrow and Sunday, noon-4 p.m., at the ICA. (A shortened version was presented this week at Summer Stages in Concord.)
At this open rehearsal, there is a sense of controlled intensity leavened with the laughter of periodic confusion. A trio of women count feverishly as they practice a tricky movement phrase coordinating steps and gestures with sung and spoken text - variations on the tune "Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree" and the children's ditty "Tony Chestnut." Another group works through a different set of moves, whispering quietly about the details of timing and placement, feet stomping out rhythms and counter-rhythms. Solos and duets fringe the periphery. The petite Rudner takes it all in, periodically scooting over to interject a correction or suggestion.
The choreographer calls the ensemble together for a sequence uniting the 10 New York dancers she has brought with her and the eight Boston-area performers chosen for the project - all women. "Just watch the New York dancers," Rudner calls out. "Go where they go, do what they do." As all the performers gradually pick up the pulse in the music, gently bobbing heads, each adds subtle individual inflections in the arms and legs. They slowly coalesce into a twitching huddle of bodies. Rudner laughs. "I didn't choreograph anything, it just happened," she says to no one in particular with obvious delight. "Oh my God, that's a good moment."
But Rudner is being modest. Her choreographic imprint is vividly apparent as she tweaks timings and dynamics. A master of rhythm, she deftly weaves improvisatory moments into ensemble sections of precise, intricate counterpoint. Tempo shifts on a dime. Moments of silence are interrupted by spoken words, the beat of a metronome, taped music (like Xavier Cugat's "Tico Tico," recorded from her mother's old Victrola). The performance also includes live percussion by William Catanzaro and Jerome Morris, Rudner's colleagues at Sarah Lawrence College, where she heads the dance department. Playing off the theater's setting, the work is an ever-changing kaleidoscope, held together with a keen intelligence for structural clarity.
The complexity and layering of materials in this and Rudner's other long-form pieces celebrate the reality of being a dancer, she says - the vast amount of time committed to learning, creating, teaching. And part of the concept of the piece is to invite the audience in on the process, as if we've just dropped in on a moment in time in a dancer's life. "Dancing-on-View" juxtaposes sections of highly rigorous, rhythmically intricate work with sections of simple, fairly pedestrian movement. In one section, Boston dancer Carey Foster will be taught a new phrase of movement on the spot by one of Rudner's company members, illuminating the process of learning unfamiliar choreography.
"It's about doing what we do," Rudner says with quiet matter-of-factness. "Dancers dance, often whether people see it or not. It's not content-driven or political. It has to do with community, how we're situated in society, that we do this despite the odds, staying with it. The duration [of the piece] is about that."
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Rudner graduated from Barnard College and performed with a number of troupes during the 1960s. But she is best known as a founding member of Twyla Tharp's legendary company, started in 1965. "She gave me myself," Rudner says of her long artistic relationship with Tharp. "Those early ideas, the rigor and devotion, the empowering of the dancer - it was my most invaluable professional experience."
When Rudner demonstrates a solo for one of the groups, you can see why she was considered one of Tharp's most luminous performers for more than two decades, known for her speed, exuberance, and a highly refined style that is sensuous and expressive yet appears completely natural. Her unruly, gray-streaked curls bob as she runs in place, then sidesteps with a loose fluidity that belies her age. She's 65, but looks at least a decade younger. Knees swivel, hips glide, and arms float with a jazzy elegance. She's planning to dance a solo and a trio in the new piece - "If I can get up and down off my ass," she says with sassy, self-deprecating humor. (Rudner has dealt with degenerative osteoarthritis for almost 25 years.)
Summer Stages director Richard Colton, who danced with Rudner in Tharp's company in the '70s, calls Rudner Webern to Tharp's Schoenberg in the way she distills a similar aesthetic into "its pure crystal form." Both choreographers share a fondness for dissecting and reassembling phrases and a casual, loose-limbed style that is fluid yet rigorous, with intricate footwork and rhythmic drive. "It's kind of minimalist, sticking to this organic choreographic form in which you can see and hear the structure," Colton explains. "It's constantly rejuvenating the possibilities of dance."
Rudner, who has also worked in theater, opera, and film, began to develop her own choreography during her years with Tharp, creating pieces for the small Sara Rudner Performance Ensemble, often dances that played with time, space, and occasion. Rudner says she is not as interested in presenting finished pieces as in revealing dance as a process, and the four-hour "Dancing-on-View" is a prime example. "It has kind of an epic quality," Colton says. "It brings to light the human experience of time, and it reminds you how wonderful and complex life is."
The original "Dancing-on-View" premiered in May 2007 at New York's Baryshnikov Arts Center, building off of a 1975 work she called a "dance marathon" for a quartet of dancers performing continuously for five hours. She also created a four-hour version for the Irish Modern Dance Theatre last August. This new incarnation references the other pieces yet features new movement. Phrases are constantly recycled and varied, so Rudner says the audience can drop in and out at will during the four-hour span and still get the essence of the piece.
Foster, a veteran Boston performer with companies such as Prometheus Dance and Snappy Dance Theater, calls working on the piece "very intense, in a good way. We have a lot to learn very quickly, and the rhythmic patterns are changing all the time. We count in two, in six, in eight, in 21. It's all over the place. The first week I was in my head trying to count. This week it's been very satisfying to be able to flow within this complicated structure. It almost seems she's composing music with the movement, all these different rhythms coming together and separating."
Rudner calls one rhythmically challenging section "Brain Damage." "Sometimes you have to stop and start again, because it feels like your circuits are overloading," she says. "But if you can laugh through your frustration. . .
"I can't keep track of it, and that's why I like it," she adds. "I like to be challenged by what I make, to be slightly out of control with it, let the whole thing wash over me. All of a sudden I'll see new relationships I hadn't seen before, dancers surprise me, do things in a way I never even thought of. You plant a seed, and something grows that you didn't expect. I love that."
