Mainstage interprets
language of dance

Program presents four works
featuring the power of movement

By Davida Monk

As a dancer, choreographer and professor in the dance program at the University of Calgary, I am often asked how the audience should ideally view—that is, understand—a contemporary dance work.
While watching rehearsals for Mainstage 2006, the annual production that invites professional choreographers to create work for our students, I was struck by the simple yet profound answer to this question.

Movement is the language of dance. If one considers this while watching contemporary dance, the work will powerfully reveal itself.

Mainstage 2006 presents four distinct performance worlds, each distinguished from the other by the choreographer’s visual, theatrical and aural aesthetic. By noticing where the dancers focus their efforts, by remembering which gestures and images are stressed, by experiencing vicariously the kinesthetic depth and range of movement, an audience member can truly understand each dance.

The four Mainstage choreographers are: Sabrina Matthews, of recent and celebrated tenure with Alberta Ballet; Jamie Freeman-Cormack, graduate of the dance program and dancer and choreographer with Decidedly Jazz Danceworks; Professor Darcy Mcgehee, creator, researcher and artistic director of New Dance Theatre; and Wojeich Mochniej, frequent guest instructor with the dance program and co-artistic director (with Professor Melissa Monteros) of W & M Physical Theatre.

In Matthews’s contemporary ballet, the dancers perform in bare feet, taking full advantage of their experience in both classical ballet and modern training techniques. During rehearsals, she stressed the volume, strength, grounding and expansion of all the dancers’ gestures. They pulled and pressed their bodies spiraling spines and searching arms.

Matthews’s inspiration for this work springs from her fascination with the enormous significance the simplest tiny moment can take in one’s life.

Mcgehee’s inspiration is of distant personal memories and recent impressions of her birthplace, New Orleans, with its rich music and dance traditions and its struggles during the devastating flood of 2005.

Her dance vocabulary is driven by emotion and unfolds in a theatrically charged environment. The dancers move in repeated motives, at times urgent and abrupt, at times dissipating to a dramatic stillness.

In complete contrast to these works, Freeman-Cormack has created a contemporary jazz work in which the movement vocabulary bears a direct relationship to the variety of rhythms and feelings of the musical medley score. It is challenging, aerobically charged, tightly wound and infused with the playful spirit of the music.

Mochniej’s movement vocabulary flows like currents across the stage. The dancers explore large, limby movement through all levels of space. They are in the air, on the floor. Duets, trios and larger groups sweep in and out of our awareness; a male and female couple maintains a constant presence.

When you come to Mainstage, you will see choreographers’ visions and dancers’ performances, but most of all, you will experience the power of movement and imagination.

• Davida Monk is artistic director of Mainstage Dance ’06, which runs March 16 to 18, at 8 p.m. at the University Theatre. Tickets are $15 (adults), $10 (students/seniors), available through Campus Ticket Centre at (403) 220-7202 or at the door.