In choreographer's new dance, a tour of the ICA
With this weekend's premiere of Stephan Koplowitz's site-specific work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Summer Stages Dance hits a kind of jackpot. From the Concord-based festival's beginning 11 years ago, directors Amy Spencer and Richard Colton have set out to find new, compelling ways to bring the Boston-area dance community together and forge creative relationships with other local cultural institutions.
Koplowitz's new work connects the festival not only with the museum, but with 23 performers from a dozen of the area's top modern-dance companies, including Prometheus Dance, Lorraine Chapman The Company, Anna Myer and Dancers, and Kinodance.
The 30-minute piece takes place at eight sites around the periphery of the ICA building, with the audience guided by ushers from place to place. It begins with the audience facing away from the ICA as the dancers move on and around the large rocks by the parking lot, a kind of "palate cleansing" prologue that Koplowitz designed to acknowledge how elegantly the new building references the natural world around it. As the action gradually moves around the building, the performers dance in the glare of the ICA's huge glass windows, wedged underneath a giant staircase, and all along the grandstand steps, ending with a tableau that has the audience facing the Boston skyline.
The work is titled "(iseea)," a play on the ICA's name. "It's about the building, and it's about how we see the building," explains Koplowitz, an award-winning choreographer/director who has staged other large-scale site-specific performances around the world, including New York's Grand Central Terminal, the British Library in London, and a coal-processing plant in Germany. "The piece is meant to be intimate, organic," he continues. "It's abstract, playing off the rhythms and patterns inherent in the building. In a way, I'm giving the audience my own tour, my reading of the space."
Film and television composer Justin Samaha is also creating an original score for the work featuring sampled and electronic sounds that Koplowitz hopes will heighten the experience.
Participating dancer Marjorie Morgan attests to the unique nature of the piece. "Ideally, the audience will have one continuous experience of different sites along the ICA building, and they're all very different," Morgan says. "Inside the piece, I'm getting such a better sense of the building and of outside the building -- looking at the sky, smelling the sea, feeling the rocks, moving up against the glass, feeling the stability of the steel in the walls, the beauty of the wood on the back staircase. As a dancer, it's very visceral, and hopefully some of that will translate to the audience."
The 51-year-old Koplowitz, now the dean of dance at the California Institute of the Arts, had sparked the interest of Summer Stages' Spencer and Colton with his acclaimed 2004 work "The Grand Step Project," which brought together 50 dancers and singers for performances on landmark staircases all over New York City. They'd hoped Summer Stages could present a version of the piece in Boston, but were unable to get enough funding for this season. (They're aiming now for next summer.) But when they saw the new ICA, they felt they'd found the perfect site, plus an ideal organization with which to collaborate on a new work.
Because the compressed three-week schedule didn't leave time for auditions, Colton tapped area companies for the "crème de la crème" cast, including many dancers who had never met or worked together. Koplowitz arrived for the first rehearsal knowing only two of them. In the first week, a core group of 13 worked four hours a day for six days. Last week, they were joined by another six dancers, with four more added for this final week's rehearsals.
"It was a strange feeling to come to the first rehearsal and meet everyone for the first time," Koplowitz says. "It was a little scary. But the dancers are great, working really hard."
Koplowitz gave the dancers both specific movements and creative assignments. One early task involved "reading" the aforementioned rocks, using surface patterns and shapes as a "score" for movement. "It allowed me to see how the dancers moved and what kind of creative choices they made," the choreographer explains.
"It's a nice balance to generate movement and be a dancer, be on both ends of teaching and learning material," says Morgan. She has choreographed her own share of site-specific work and says the experience has made her think differently about her approach. It's also helped her connect with a lot of people in the dance community she'd never met. "I hope we'll be more interested and engaged in each other's work, more curious, open up out of our own little corners," she says.
That's the idea. Spencer says, "We're always trying to find ways to galvanize the Boston dance community, working to build that fertile environment where artists interact and create a kind of loop of creative energy."
