Picture: Duhaime Movement Project

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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Today, from Molly:

From the beginning, I was interested in partnering with a specific type of space for "very vary." An intimate space was appealing to me, one with a texture of its own – a space that had a distinctiveness and an architectural complexity. The newly constructed Eccles Blackbox Theater captivated me with its wood walls, eggplant colored curtains, hanging light fixtures, and windows that overlooked downtown Salt Lake City.

In sharing the work with a new space (a space that I have only seen online), I am interested again in the intimacy of Shawl-Anderson, in its history that I can imagine is palpable, and in how the structural layering of "very vary" can shift in new and interesting ways because of the limitations of this smaller space. I designed the dance much like chapters of a pop-up book, considering all dimensions of the stage and how the dance over time, and in each chapter, unfolds, revealing more of itself. For me, the power of this type of work exists in the potency of proximity – how the audience becomes a necessary part of the dance in the exchange of energy with the performers, creating more possibility for connection.

Check out a video of the project here.

 

Picture: Duhaime Movement Project

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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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