From Blog Director Jill Randall:

Lately, I have been thinking about dance writing and dance publicity. How do we share/invite/entice/preview a work for our potential audience members? Salt Lake City-based artist Molly Heller and I are playing with this idea for the 7 days leading up to her show, very vary, at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley on December 2nd and 3rd. (Get your tickets here.)

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Photo credit: Duhaime Movement Project

Today 3 of the dancers comment on revisiting the work this fall, several months after its first run in May 2017 in Salt Lake City:

Melissa Younker:
After revisiting the work, we asked ourselves, do these things still feel true? In very vary we tap into our child, current, and imagined selves in a layered and nonlinear way. For me, many of the things I fear about myself are also the things that I find power in. My fears and hopes are tangled. I notice that individually and together we have worked through (and continue to work through) our fears, joys, memories, dreams… Every day is different; something that feels playful for me might take form into something dark only moments later. Molly allows for the dancers to be true to where we are in the work. Never recreating. This makes every moment an opportunity to know where you are inside of the work, or to find it in the process. Also, to allow yourself (forgive yourself) to be a fluctuating person.

Florian Alberge:
This is not the first time I have worked with Molly. Revisiting her work is always an experience, depending on how much time has passed in between. It is not a second chance; it is a deeper understanding. The material emerges from ourselves, our stories, scars and bliss; so when time passes, it is necessary to reassess where I stand in front of those.

Is my understanding deeper? What's behind those doors that were once locked? Have I changed or have I stayed the same? Reentering Molly's work gives me the opportunity to create a dialogue with myself. Often, what I can't see or talk about is addressed by the other dancers in the work, and by performing with them, I understand myself better.

Mary Lyn Graves:
There is an intriguing flexibility to Molly's work that invites curiosity and transformation, a combination of complexity and imagination that has only deepened as we revisit the work. very vary, in both creation and performance, asks that we undergo change, that we physically engage with who we wish we were and who we believe we are, what we hope for ourselves and the fears accompany that. The wonderful difficulty of these questions is that you never definitively know the answers. I felt like I was only beginning to understand very vary when we premiered it in May. And after months away, I find I am asking the same unanswerable questions of very vary that I ask myself when dancing it. What do I want this to be? What do I think it is? How do I hold the things I hope for the work and the things I fear about it simultaneously? As we revisit the work, my answers feel stronger and more open. The more I know, the more space is created for being curious, and the more I can move with the particular willingness that comes with being unsure.

Check out a video of the project here.

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very vary, choreographed by Molly Heller

Shawl-Anderson Dance Center

2704 Alcatraz Avenue

Berkeley, CA 94705

Saturday, December 2nd at 8pm (post show Q&A with Heller and cast, moderated by Katie Faulkner)

Sunday, December 3rd at 3:30pm

Tickets: $20 General/ $15 Student

veryvary.brownpapertickets.com

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Related links:

Artist Profile: Molly Heller

MFA Program Spotlight: University of Utah (Molly is a professor in the program)

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