Cleveland, August 2020
By Steve Sucato
Two themes captured the effects the global pandemic had on the dance community in Cleveland, Ohio: loss (of income and performances) and uncertainty (about how to get to what’s next). But Cleveland’s professional troupes came up with various ideas on paths forward with one thing in common: the need to press ahead.
August marked the return to performing for many, with The City is Our Stage, the first large-scale citywide arts event since the pandemic hit. Some 30 local dance, music, theatre, poetry and circus performers participated in the drive-to event throughout greater Cleveland’s neighbourhoods. Organized by MorrisonDance founding artistic director Sarah Morrison, designer Trad A. Burns and Chuck Karnak, The City is Our Stage gave audiences the opportunity to see live performance samplers of 10 minutes and under on porches, front lawns, driveways and parking lots along 10 distinct driving routes.
Inlet Dance Theatre got back to performing with The City is Our Stage. The 20-year-old modern dance company presented four solos co-created by founder and executive/artistic director Bill Wade along with dancers Sabrina Lindhout, Anna Rhodes, Katie Knettel and Stephanie Ruth Roston, themed around each dancer’s reactions to the pandemic and using the jumping off phrase “I am…” The solos, set to a variety of music and voiceovers from the dancers describing their emotions during this time, contained a range of handholds and gestures, such as the tapping of fingers to wrists and cradling the face. Each solidly danced solo hit home with heartfelt feelings and affirmations about getting through.
The company also participated in Tremont neighbourhood’s 17th annual Arts in August festival with a virtual showing on August 22 of previously recorded repertoire works. The MOMIX-like BALListic (2004) featured the dancers as creature-like beings performing with red physio balls. A Pilobolus-style male trio, This Could Hurt (2005), had Joshua Brown, Dominic Moore-Dunson and Kevin Parker playfully lifting one another in acrobatic partnering that wowed.
Also part of Arts in August, on August 8 Verb Ballets performed Bolero by the late Ohio Ballet founder Heinz Poll (a modified version was later presented at The City is Our Stage). Maybe not their finest rendition of Poll’s 1966 masterwork, the Arts in August performance saw its 11 dancers, led by Lieneke Matte, shake off some of the rust of being sidelined by the pandemic and by ballet’s end deliver a spirited effort. Moving through Poll’s almost martial arts kata-structured movement phrases that built one on another à la Ravel’s Bolero score, the ballet reached its invigorating crescendo of cape-swirling and spinning movement that never fails to excite and delight.
Verb Ballets also reprised Tommie Waheed-Evans’ Surge.Capacity.Force (2017), a powerful indictment of America’s recent unjust immigration and foreign travel policies set to Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land, and Verb dancer Kate Webb’s beautifully imaged Still Moving (2020), based on a poem by Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore.
GroundWorks DanceTheater dove back into the public eye after a noticeable absence with their nextSPACE initiative that included online dance and creative process classes, artist chats and popup drive-in performances in Cleveland and nearby Akron. A drive-in performance on August 15 in the parking lot of Cleveland’s legendary Agora Theater featured the audience participation piece Flags in which audience members honked their car horns and flashed their lights via directions given out by signal flags.
The premiere of executive artistic director David Shimotakahara’s duet Jigsaw was lit by the headlights of 30 vehicles circling masked dancers Nicole Hennington and Annie Morgan. The lively and athletic work with its puzzle-like movement structure approach was reminiscent of works by contemporary dance pioneer Laura Dean. At times, Hennington and Morgan moved in sharp, almost geometric patterns while executing Shimotakahara’s bendy, elongated-limbed choreography that appeared to pour from them instinctually. Danced to composers Steve Reich and Mats Berstrom’s Electric Counterpoint, Jigsaw proved a shining star in a world of pandemic darkness.
Gearing up for their 40th anniversary season, Dancing Wheels — the United States’ oldest physically integrated dance company — presented a film preview of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by up-and-coming choreographer Catherine Meredith. Created in part over Zoom earlier in the summer, the 20-minute abbreviated version of the full production slated for 2021 was shot on location in mid-August at Cleveland Metroparks’ Squire’s Castle and its surrounding woods. The Shakespearean-like setting for the ballet created an apt backdrop for Dancing Wheels’ first foray into dance on film with Meredith’s illustrative and flowing choreography illuminating the talents of the 10-member troupe.
Because of the pandemic, DANCECleveland moved its annual ADF in CLE — a summer satellite festival of North Carolina’s globally known American Dance Festival — online, July 31-August 8. It delivered previously recorded performances by France’s Company WANG RAMIREZ, Chicago’s Lucky Plush Productions, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company and Israel’s Vertigo Dance Company. But beyond the fabulous dance, DANCECleveland upped the ante on the virtual audience experience with a full-blown virtual playbill and informative interviews with the artists speaking about themselves and their works. While no substitute for the live theatre experience, ADF in CLE was a soul-nourishing stand-in.
