Unlike other dance shows on campus that tend to draw large crowds at the Cohen Auditorium, the Tufts Dance Program's 25th Anniversary Concert features more intimate, relaxed modern dance pieces by the Tufts Dance Ensemble in the Jackson Dance Lab. "Our program produces more intimate performances of artistic and cultural dance for smaller audiences," said Alice Trexler, associate professor and director of the Tufts dance program. "It's what we like to do and it's how we like to relate to audiences."
The Tufts Dance Ensemble is a class offered at Tufts where students of all years get the opportunity to explore and interpret dance through a variety of media, whether it be poetry, written instruction or a series of photographs. Daniel McCusker, director of the ensemble, explained: "The class focus is really to get more technically experienced dancers to use their skills in ways that they wouldn't normally use them."
Although McCusker provides the students in the ensemble with guidance in terms of the structure and sequence of their pieces, it is essentially the dancers who work together to choreograph the show. "It's really collaboration," McCusker said, "not only with me, but between each other, because we teach one another and generate a unison phrase. [There is] a lot of compromise and joint-decision making involved."
McCusker often pairs students together for warm-up projects to inspire their dances, ranging from having one dancer try to fit into all of the negative space around another person's body to asking the students to find ways to move over, under or around one another. While everyone is given the same prompt, these exercises foster creativity in interpretation by allowing the dancers to let their movement take them to very different places. "One of the ideas is that I'm trying to get them to generate material that is outside of their normal experiences, beyond their comfort zone," McCusker said.
The concept behind the ensemble's first piece, "Sextet," came from one of McCusker's less conventional projects, which fused dance with words. Without telling any of his students, McCusker cleverly took instructions on how to do the tango, removed all references to the steps' gender and rhythm and boiled the instructions down to basic directions of mirroring and movement. McCusker remarked, "The students are getting the written instructions out of context and being made to interpret them. So they all have the same set of instructions, but they're all doing very different things with them."
"Sextet" features three pairs of dancers that appear to be doing three separate pieces about the stage, but the fluidity and juxtaposition of their dances create an effortless continuity between their steps that ties them all together. Jazz guitarist Bill Frisell's "Wildwood Flower" also adds to the dance's relaxed feel, exemplifying the dancers' graceful, organic movements.
Senior Amy Rabinowitz, a dancer who has been part of the ensemble for the past four years, enjoys seeing the various bits and pieces come together. "We re-use movement in different places and in different ways so there's a lot of repetition of particular phrases," she said. "I think it lends well to creating a coherent piece."
The ensemble's second dance, "Five Open Spaces," is not only a larger piece that features 17 dancers, but it is also much longer, running for an impressive 34 minutes. Performed to Philip Glass's "Metamorphosis," students created the material for this piece through a combination of responding to poetry by Eammon Grennan, finding ways to utilize negative space, sequencing and creating transitions between a series of photographs, and incorporating the ideas of stationary versus traveling materials.
In addition to the ensemble's performances, there are two other dances being performed in the anniversary concert. McCusker and Associate Professor of Music David Locke, who teaches a class on West African dance, collaborate on an intercultural, conversational piece that combines modern and West African dance, while Trexler works with a Tufts student, faculty member Mila Thigpen and Tufts alum Beth Appleton Furman (LA '87) on a dance that portrays the different stages in a women's life. In honor of the Tufts Dance Program's 25th anniversary, the Jackson Dance Lab also features a historical display and timeline outside of its performance studio for those interested in the development and progression of the program over the years.
Although the ensemble has always worked hard to put on a good show, both the dancers and McCusker seem to agree that this year's anniversary concert will have even stronger performances. "I feel like the big piece ("Five Open Spaces") feels more coherent and clear [than previous years']," McCusker said. "There are longer stretches of dancing where there are just four to six people, and in the past sometimes this was very episodic. I feel like this dance has big chunks, but it's not so fragmented."
The Dance Program's 25th Anniversary Concert will be performed on Nov. 21 and 22 at 8 p.m. in the Jackson Dance Lab. Free tickets can be reserved by calling the Dance Program office at 617-627-2556.
