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 A seamless evening of work, Limits of the Marvelous is a movement dialogue on discovery and recognition of the many ways in which people expire and rebuild themselves. This full-length evening weaves three years of work into an abstract telling of both magnificent and minute personal deaths and rebirths. In collaboration with award-winning Video Designer Austin Forbord, and lighting designer Max, Limits will highlight the idea that there is a time-limit on everything. We live in such comfort with the things of which we take advantage; a best friend, a career, a self-defining characteristic, a life-long commitment. Limits explores both the explosively challenging and carefully tender as it paces back and forth in disbelief of the need to let go of something we never really thought we’d have to release and the freedom we achieve by doing so.
Limits is a series of vignettes redesigned from recent premieres and commissions: including Corps de Co., Streaming, & Anahata, to highlight similarities within humans as they experience major & unexpected change. Either gradually or radically, these stories of strangeness and sometimes tragedy demand movement and evoke potent emotional response. The meat of this complete 55 minute work reveals itself within the transitional material of the evening. Poignant solos and duets are in rehearsal for cast members to bring clarity to the emotional realization of letting go. Earlier works, Epitaphe de Marie (1999) and Anahata (2007) will reshape to infuse potent emotional drive addressing the need to be present as a relationship or life deteriorates into nothing.
Distinguished Bay Area dance artist Joan Lazarus will perform the solo role in Epitaphe de Marie, originally choreographed in 1999 to reconcile the death of my friend, Leandra Smith. Leandra was one of the first diagnosed cases of synovial sarcoma and after beating it for nine months, she died at the age of 27. Originally created for dancer, Melanie Elms at SUNY Purchase College, Epitaphe was recently recast and danced at the 2007 Vision Series to inspire young artists with classical modern form. An ideal soloist, Lazarus performs the dying role with elegance and strength and the cast responds profoundly to her stage presence. In realizing the limit of a lifespan, Epitaphe takes a central role in the evening’s collage.
In addition, Streaming (2007 Stanford Dance Division Commission) has grown into a mixed cast of seven and will be the only piece, in which I myself, will dance. Streaming addresses inconsistancies of truth between individuals. Comprised of duets, solos and a small ensemble section, Streaming is danced to the elongated repetition of local composer, Ryan Francesconi’s cello piece, entitled “SunSpot”. Using imagery from the slippery and infusing form that water takes as it elegantly rushes into the cracks and crevasses of a new space, the phrase work is both delicately precise and circularly fierce. The manipulative duets shadow each other’s eyes from the audience, and frame the work with an element of forced denial. There are so many conflicting truths rushing by us in our everyday activity that denial of their magnitude is almost mandatory.
Former Lower-Left company member and Cal grad, Colleen Phillips returns to the stage to join Dance Ceres, after a hiatus in pursuit of her law degree. Phillips brings passionate commitment with her presence in the evening’s finale, Corps de Co., a recent WestWaveDance festival success, which pulls back the curtain on itself to expose individual layers addressing the balance between satisfaction and nec essity in a functioning system. Corps de Co., which was hailed by dance critic Allan Ulrich as “invigorating” (July 2007), investigates both the systems that require multiple efforts by multiple players and the individual stories within them. It is a dance made within and in spite of our current political and societal regime.
Another year of astonishingly profound change! - May I always be so blessed as to be surrounded by such talented and caring dancers! …and may I continue to seek humility as they witness me in such a perpetual state of learning. - bbc, Dec '06 - Dec '07
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