There’s an art to just being a dance company, but it’s a complex one. There’s a choreography to all of the moving parts, a movement to all of the emerging challenges and a design to how they’re met. At Ballet 5:8, you can see this art a lot of ways, and one of them is the way the Company presents to the world what it is they have to share. This is usually called “marketing” or “promotion”, but when done well, it’s a real art, not that different from arts like choreography and music composition, where an artist shares a vision, or a feeling, or a perspective, or a hope. At a dance company, marketing at its best is the art of sharing what the company’s artists have to share, both telling people about a program like Compass (Ballet 5:8’s evening length work at Chicago’s Athenaeum Theatre on November 10th), and making it possible, through all the arts of content creation, for people like us at DancerMusic do so as well.
The very heart of what a dance company has to share with its audience is the choreography and its performance. In our PRE-View of Ballet 5:8’s Compass, Julianna Slager shared with us her thoughts and process in the development of the four works in the program. Here we’ve reached out to Amy Kozol Sanderson, Ballet 5:8’s Executive Director. Although the role of Executive Director of a dance company is not always seen as an artistic one, it’s often exactly that. There is a different choreography in the organization and motivation of all of the individuals and all of the arts that together make a dance company successful. So here, Amy Sanderson, along with some of the performers in these four works, share with us another perspective on Compass.
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All God’s Children
Choreography by Julianna Slager • Photo Courtesy of Ballet 5:8
“The movement style is so unique and different… The work is like something you’ve never seen before – quirky, creative, beautiful, bold.” — Laura Peterman
All Gods Children is a ballet based on a poem by Sojourner Truth. Julianna created it as a way to look at the difficult, often polarizing subject of race relations from a fresh perspective. To do this, she created an imaginary world where each “race” is characterized by a color (blue, purple, etc.) and has its own signature movements. Julianna describes the setting as an “alternate reality” imagined as a way to “look past the different cultures and the different colors of skin and the different languages and just see each other as purely human.” Julianna used music by John Adams with a heavy, percussive rhythm that serves as the underpinning for the movement-dialect she for each of the four imagined cultures.
“It has been so fun to be part of the creative process for All God’s Children,” says cast member Laura Peterman. “The movement style is so unique and different… The work is like something you’ve never seen before – quirky, creative, beautiful, bold.” Emily Ratkos, reflecting on her movements in the work, describes “sequences are quick and bright, intermixed with fluid and sustained steps.” She says that the musical score “readily draws out the spunkiness and lighthearted character qualities.” All said and done, by reframing the issue in another world and starting from scratch, we can see ourselves more clearly. As Peterman says, All God’s Children has challenged her perceptions of others. “Maybe we’re not so different after all.”
— Amy Sanderson
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Shades of Refrain
Choreography by Julianna Slager • Photo Courtesy of Ballet 5:8
Cast member Jessica Lohr describes Shades of Refrain as an “extremely thoughtful piece that through movement captures the deepest emotions we as human beings experience.”
Shades of Refrain is a modern day interpretation of the ancient book of Psalms. Rather than focusing on a specific text from the Psalms, the work captures the essence of what the Psalms are, for those in ancient times or today – a series of heart cries from the created to the Creator. The choreography is heavily influenced by arch of the score, by Joby Talbot, and was coupled with abstract images and impressions of scenes described in Psalms. The finished work, Julianna says, has a “melodic and lyrical overtone… unwrapping the human heart and the poetry of our most intimate moments.”
Cast member Jessica Lohr describes Shades of Refrain as an “extremely thoughtful piece that through movement captures the deepest emotions we as human beings experience.” She says that the movement is “definitely balletic,” but she also notes some “deeper, more lyrical aspects that capture the overall tone of the piece.” Referring to her experience dancing the work, which does not have defined characters, she says happily: “The music and choreography are so beautiful that it has felt natural to slip into the style and emotion of Shades.” Speaking to the emotional arc woven into the choreography, Jessica describes “a journey of joy, sorrow, peace, pain… and ultimately to the hope and awe we can experience when standing before our sovereign Creator.”
— Amy Sanderson
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The Mother
Choreography by Julianna Slager • Photo Courtesy of Ballet 5:8
“The mother’s movement in this ballet is a contrast of force and abandonment” — Lorianne Barclay
“The Mother sheds an unbiased light on the uncomfortable topic of abortion,” says Ballet 5:8 Solo Artist Lorianne Barclay, who dances the role of the work’s main character, Gwendolyn Brooks. “It’s not an easy story, but a needed one,” she says. “I would describe this ballet as being similar to watching a train wreck that you just can’t look away from.”
Julianna’s inspiration for the work is a poem by Brooks, a Chicagoan and Pulitzer Prize author. “There are times when empathy and compassion are desperately needed,” Juilanna says. “One of those times is when you find yourself in a situation such as Gwendolyn Brooks found herself in when she wrote the poem The Mother.” The poem deals with the abortion of several of Gwendolyn’s children during her time as a resident on the southside of Chicago, bringing to light the tragedy the devastation and the deep ache that was left by those actions. In the poem, Gwendolyn wrestles with the truth behind her action and yet the feeling that it was necessary in order to give her children what she thought of as a better life.
Julianna’s work, also titled The Mother, is an interpretation of the emotion in Brooks’ poem. “The mother’s movement in this ballet is a contrast of force and abandonment,” says Barclay. “One moment I am forcing my leg where to go, the next I’m wandering in a turn. Much of the choreography in its nature invokes the emotions felt in this piece.” “In creating The Mother, Julianna used a juxtaposition of realism and surrealism. The stage is bare except for a lone chair – the choreography, music and lighting together create a haunting, dreamy world where we see Gwendolyn’s character wrestling with her real and imagined memories of her children that never were.
Libby Dennen, who dances the role of one of Gwendolyn’s children, says that “a lot of the steps are actually pretty simple. The hard part is giving those steps a lifeless life.” She says that she finds the work to be “heart wrenching” and “hard to watch… And yet you can’t take your eyes off it. It’s hauntingly beautiful.”
— Amy Sanderson
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Strangers and Angels
Choreography by Julianna Slager • Photo Courtesy of Ballet 5:8
“There is something so breathtaking about the moment when the two time periods collide in the work. I feel like it shows how history has repeated and cries out for a break in the cycle of heartache that has occurred.” — Olivia Kruse
“Strangers and Angels has a unparalleled approach in how it tells its story,” says Solo Artist and cast member Antonio Rosario. “There is mime involved, contortion of the body, and intense and unexpected movements. The music enhances the movement and also sets the tone as to where we are in the story. This work is raw in it’s story-telling and it doesn’t hold back.”
As Julianna describes it, the work “traces the impact individuals have on our lives and how those impressions leave a legacy through the centuries.” A descendant of immigrants herself – as we all are in some form or fashion – Slager was fascinated to discover in her early research for the work that there are striking parallels between the current worldwide refugee crisis, and events in 1917, exactly 100 years ago. She eventually decided to create characters in her work modeled after refugees from the Armenian Genocide in 1917, and from the current Syrian crisis in 2017. The ballet shows each of the groups individually, and then in juxtaposition. “ There is no rest, there is no comfort,” says Julianna. She modeled the choreography to reflect this restless, exhausted, desperate wandering that never seems to end. “They roam train stations, city streets and airports constantly searching for the new life they had hoped for.”
“The first movement, the 1917 time period, has very weighted choreography,” says cast member Olivia Kruse. “It really brings the feelings of despair and struggle to life.” In contrast, she says, the 2017 movement vocabulary is “fast paced and intricate. It is also done in tennis shoes. It gives it a more pedestrian feel…There is something so breathtaking about the moment when the two time periods collide in the work. I feel like it shows how history has repeated and cries out for a break in the cycle of heartache that has occurred.”
— Amy Sanderson
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Ballet 5:8 presents Compass at The Athenaeum Theatre (2936 N Southport Ave, Chicago, IL 60657) on Friday, November 10, 2017 at 7:30pm. Tickets can be purchased from the Athenaeum box office ($30 for adults, $20 for students and seniors, $15 for children 12 and under), by phone at 773 935 6875, or online from this link.
