Ballet Des Moines dancer Megan Boyette draws with her feet, with help from Olivia Valentine, right. (Photo: Jami Milne)
By Michael Morain
Editor
When you watch Olympic figure skating or “Dancing with the Stars,” you can forget how hard the performers are working. They’re leaping and spinning and lifting each other into the air, but the TV cameras make it look easy.
But at a Ballet Des Moines rehearsal last week in the company’s downtown studio, you couldn’t miss the dancers’ exertion — how fast they were moving, how hard they were breathing. And how gracefully they pulled it off.
They’re polishing up three world premieres for a program called “Nothing Holds Still,” billed as “a meditation on change, time and the fleeting nature of stillness” on Friday and Saturday at Hoyt Sherman Place. Each of the three short works in the show has a different origin story and lots of moving parts, including live music from the Belin Quartet. Here’s a quick look at what to expect.
“Behind. Between. Beyond.”
Choreographed by DaYoung Jung, with original music by Philip Daniel
Jung grew up in South Korea, trained at the Bolshoi in Moscow and has performed worldwide. She’s now based at the Oklahoma City Ballet and came to Des Moines a few weeks ago to set her new work on the local team. Choreography, as she put it, is “not just to create steps, but to ask questions, sit in the uncertainty and feel alive in the act of making.”
“bound”
Choreographed by Cameron Miller, with music by Travis Lake and Franz Schubert
This piece grew out of Ballet Des Moines’ annual cross-training workshop, when company members try out different roles — as choreographers, rehearsal directors and so forth — to develop new skills. Several dancers choreographed new work for the upcoming show, but artistic director Eric Trope ultimately tapped Miller, who’s danced with the company for the last five years.
His choreography, with its “really, really intricate partner work … stuck with me as something I thought was so beautiful and wanted to see more of,” Trope said. During last week’s rehearsal, he likened one of its busier passages to “Penn Station at rush hour, when everyone’s kind of in their own world.” The music by Travis Lake is a revved-up techno riff on Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.”
Miller divided the work into three movements that explore different meanings of the “bound” title — to be tied down but also to take leaping strides or to be destined for a new place or experience.
He chose Schubert’s “Ave Maria” for the final movement and dedicated it to his late uncle, who had always supported his career in dance. The experience, he said, is “nothing short of a dream come true.”
“Spilled Shadows”
Choreographed by Eric Trope, with music by Fanny Mendelssohn
Of the three works in the upcoming program, this one’s creation is the most unusual, thanks to the imagination of the company’s current artist-in-residence, Olivia Valentine, who teaches visual arts at Iowa State.
She enlisted company member Megan Boyette to “draw” on a big sheet of paper, using her feet to spread black paint across the surface. Afterward, Valentine photographed the drawing and fed the photos into a digital loom, which she used to recreate the image as a 5-yard jacquard weaving that will serve as a backdrop to the dance.
Valentine said she wanted to take something that happens fast and slow it down. It’s about “capturing something that’s more ethereal,” she said. “It’s just a trace or shadow of movement.”
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