Dimensions Dance Theatre brings dance to the summer heat

Miami Herald

2 days ago

One plus one doesn't just make two in a pas de deux. Dance duets may amount to a singular force with their concentrated cohesion or a seeming multiplicity spread out through all the changes paired movement can bring. Now, Dimensions Dance Theatre of Miami closes its season with contrasting examples of this fluid sum among the four works of 'Summer Dances,' coming to the Moss Center Main Stage on Saturday, July 12.
Partnered exchanges will flash amid the program's ensemble pieces—Yanis Pikieris' robust 'The Four Seasons,' a company standard to Vivaldi, and the Moss main-stage debut of Alysa Pires' 'In Between,' its intimacies awash in a classic-to-contemporary ebb and flow. But the stand-alone duets will hold our attention for special rewards.
'Confronting Genius,' by Orlando Ballet's rehearsal director Heath Gill, though being staged for the first time by Dimensions, has the elements that could have been custom-made for the nine-year old Miami company from its start. Speed, punch, and plenty of flair are among the demands here that a Dimensions cast thrives on.
DDTM co-artistic directors Carlos Guerra and Jennifer Kronenberg 'were blown away,' as she puts it, by the wit and physicality of Gill's piece when they saw it two years ago at the Riverside Dance Festival, co-produced by their artistic partner Ballet Vero Beach. This ballet upholds the virtue that the directors—in their co-authored book 'Experiencing the Art of Pas de Deux' (University Press of Florida, 2016)—attribute to well-crafted partnering with its 'incredible power to take dancers and their audiences on an epic journey.'
As a standout dancer at Atlanta Ballet—his skills earning him a place on Dance Magazine's '25 To Watch' list in 2014—Gill was already forging a path in choreography (mostly for Wabi Sabi, an Atlanta Ballet summer offshoot) when he, along with other AB dancers, stepped away from their home company to form Atlanta's Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre in 2017. It was there that 'Confronting Genius' was born.
'I created it during our first season,' says Gill. 'Up to then I'd made a wealth of works but always on my timeline—whenever I had an idea, not feeling immense pressure. At Terminus I'd choreographed LORE, a full-length ballet for the first time, and I was thrilled with it. But the new year rolled around and—boom!—I had to do a new piece still feeling a bit drained.'
At this impasse, he was wondering how to stay on a steadily productive track when a Terminus dancer turned him on to 'Big Magic,' a treatise by Elizabeth Gilbert (of 'Eat Pray Love' fame) on embracing the forces that nourish the imagination.
'It's a brilliant book,' says Gill. 'The author cleverly paints a picture of how ideas come from some entity outside yourself. In classical Greece, that was the concept of the genius. If your ideas were great, it meant your genius rocked. That takes some pressure off the artist—though, of course, you still have to keep showing up to do the work. This helped me get over my roadblock. For my next project I had two dancers—the kind of parameter I love. Right there was my piece. I was going to have an artist and this external entity. And I finished it in six days.'
Gill's own genius found support in his artistic toolbox. 'I always have this catalog of ideas filed away. Every time I have a new work and feel a particular vibe, I go into it to move things along.'
And reaching in for the music is fundamental to his approach. 'I'm very rhythmic,' he says, 'having started out as a tap dancer.'
Always happy to entertain while growing up in Albion, a little town in southern Illinois, he was asked to join a nearby production of 'The Music Man,' where a connection eventually led him to a summer intensive at Houston Ballet. 'That was a big jump forward in my journey,' recalls Gill.
In 'Confronting Genius,' he turned his well-attuned ear to a rousing sound mix. 'The first track is an incredibly challenging Paganini caprice,' he explains. 'So this starts out in a burst of energy to the violin. By the time my work closes, it's soulful, simple, with another violin piece that feels fragile and beautifully human—like owning up to not having all the answers. But there's lots going on in the middle.'
That includes dancing to a voiceover of Gilbert's text. 'I'm fascinated by speech as music,' says Gill. 'The rhythm, the change in tones, make me think of songbirds speaking to each other. Of course, language brings us pictures, and these play off the physicality of the dancers in a cartoon of sorts.'
For Gill, humor is the helium that makes the weightiest of topics soar. He says, 'It invites people to the table to feel more comfortable laughing together. I've always been a bit of a cut-up myself.' Confessing his love for improv shows, he notes how timing is everything in comedy as in his art form. 'Ours is such a funny profession, and dancers can get pretty goofy. They're game to showcase this.'
If one pair of dancers can set off a string of firecracker moments, as in 'Confronting Genius,' another can focus their energy for gradual luminosity. It is what brightens 'Apollo and Daphne,' Boulder Ballet artistic director Ben Needham-Wood's deeply felt response to Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini's encapsulation of myth in a marble masterpiece.
Made flesh by the choreographer, the encounter between the ardent god and a demurring nymph—by divine intervention turned into a laurel tree within his reach—gains sentient human value, following an emotional arc that for Gill reigns over the specifics of narrative.
'The piece was inspired when I was on a trip to Italy with my mom, and we visited Rome's Borghese Gallery where the statue is,' says Needham-Wood, a student of Latin and classical mythology from his high school days in New Hampshire. Bernini's freezing of the moment of the nymph's arboreal transformation entranced mother and son for nearly their whole gallery visit.
'Bernini gives you such a strong feeling for the space around the action, and that's where my ballet lives,' says the choreographer, who listening on his headset during the flight home from Italy chanced upon Arvo Pärt's 'Spiegel im Spiegel,' its repeated three-note pattern on piano over sustained violin 'having so much air and swell it was perfect to accompany my dancers. To stand and hold a place in simplicity is one of the most difficult things for any performer to do. But it lets them and audiences connect on a deeper level.'
That's a maxim he learned from mentor Bruce Simpson, then-director of Louisville Ballet, where Needham-Wood danced and 'Apollo and Daphne' premiered in 2011, allowing the choreographer's mother to admire the work shortly before she died.
DDTM's directors ran across 'Apollo and Daphne' searching the Internet in 2017. Kronenberg says the ballet—which will be accompanied by live music—struck them as rapturous, adding that after a successful DDTM stage premiere in 2019, it streamed during the pandemic lockdown as part of Kennedy Center's Arts Across America series, serving as 'a poignant vehicle to connect with audiences on an emotional and spiritual level.'
The work, too, connects with an observation in the directors' book: 'The best array of actions and emotions within a pas de deux can prove incredibly intense and extraordinarily delicate simultaneously.' A double magic for all times, be they troubled or fine.
If you go:
WHAT: Dimensions Dance Theatre of Miami 'Summer Dances'
WHERE: The Dennis C. Moss Cultural Arts Center, 10950 SW 211 St., Miami
WHEN: 8 p.m. Saturday, July 12.
COST: $25-$45, $10 student tickets available by phone or in person with ID.
INFORMATION: [phone] or mosscenter.org
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