By Steve Sucato
Choreographer Peter Chu finished a three-week Creative Residency with GroundWorks DanceTheater recently that included community dance classes, the creation of two new commissioned works for the company, and a work-in-progress showing of those works on Friday, March 4 at Cleveland State University’s Department of Theatre & Dance’s main dance studio. The community activities led by Chu were funded in part by the Arts Midwest GIG Fund.
Born in the Bronx and raised in Cocoa Beach, Florida, Chu came from an artistic household. Under the tutelage of his mother, a music therapist, Chu studied and played the piano, guitar, and tenor saxophone.
“Music has been a part of my entire life,” says Chu. “When I hear music, it inspires me to create movement. I consider myself a musician with my body.”
Growing up, Chu was also a competitive gymnast and acrobat. If not for a fractured leg in high school, he says might have continued with gymnastics. Instead, Chu turned his focus to dance, which he says he had begun taking classes in to improve his gymnastics. Chu went on to study dance at Pittsburgh’s Point Park University and The Juilliard School in New York.
Chu has danced professionally for Canadian-based dance companies, Ballets Jazz Montréal, EZdanza, Aszure Barton & Artists, Kidd Pivot, and in singer Celine Dion’s Vegas spectacular. As a choreographer, he has created dance works for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Charlotte Ballet, Staatstheater Augsburg, Germany, Orlando Ballet Theatre, Giordano Dance Chicago, and for the television series So You Think You Can Dance. His awards include the Hector Zaraspe Prize, A.C.E. Capezio Award, and he was named a Blodgett Distinguished Artist by Harvard University for 2018. He has served as the rehearsal director for Nederlands Dans Theater 2, and in 2008, he formed project-based dance company chuthis.
Of his unique movement philosophy, Chu says he approaches movement from a wellness perspective. “I have a Tai Chi and Qigong background. It is a huge part of my movement training. I have also embraced in the past 6-7 years, my jazz dance background.”
Chu entered his creative process with GroundWorks’ dancers by providing them with what he calls “chuthis. ideas.” That is, taking the aforementioned healing movement practices and coupling them with jazz dance foundational thought including celebrating community and the releasing unnecessary tension in the body. “For me there is a deep connection between the disciplines of Qigong and Jazz,” says Chu, “They were built during times of repression to help inspire oppressed communities to heal themselves.”
The 43-year-old Chu says he loves the creative process. “It is an opportunity for me to get to connect to other communities and dance companies,” says Chu. “I don’t take it for granted. It’s a time to really get to know the people I am sharing space with.”
In his time with GroundWorks dancers Chu says he developed a deep respect for them because of their commitment to the process from beginning to end each day. “Three weeks of intense physicality can be quite exhausting,” says Chu. “I would love to work with these dancers again.”
In reflecting on the creative process for the two new works for GroundWorks that will premiere on the company’s Spring Performance Series 2022, Chu says: “I honestly entered this process wanting to reconnect to physicality, creating movement from an authentic place, and celebrating the call and response that jazz dance and music has to offer.”
Chu and choreographer’s assistant Roger Van der Poel, formerly of Nederlands Dance Theater, came into the Creative Residency with two movement phrases they taught GroundWorks’ five dancers and then Chu asked the dancers to write about what the phrases “call and response” and “calm and recover” mean to them. He then coupled their answers with two movement phrases as a jumping off point to build the new dance works. During the creative process, Chu says there was a day or two of creating dance phrases where the dancers were given physical movement but no verbal discussion around it to get the dancers into a physicality mindset and being intentional with watching and listening to the sounds their bodies were making.
That factored into Chu’s new work (un|re)cover in which he played with sound design in real time. In the work, the dancers’ voices and the sounds they are making with their bodies are amplified using microphones while they are dancing for audiences to hear as part of the work’s sound design that also includes music from Funkadelic and English composer Nicholas Bracegirdle (a.k.a. Chicane).
“What is connecting us in this work is playing with rhythm and tempo,” says Chu. “Jazz dance has taught me that rhythms unite us and create this special bond between music, movement and communities.”
Chu says the work, for the full company, is also coming from a place of recovery in thinking about our collective 3-years living under a global pandemic and the various social justice issues and other crises around the globe. In addition, he says there is this idea of taking a stand, both as standing up for something you believe in, and returning to standing and moving about after a pandemic period that had many of us sedentary in front of a television or a phone or computer screen.
“What I realized was that the piece was not about a specific narrative,” says Chu. “It’s really about this idea of accepting who we are as a community and realizing what we can do when we are united.”
Chu’s second new work, the 9 ½ minute will(O), is set to a soundscape by Mike Gordon and to the song “Willow” by singer/songwriter Joan Armatrading. It is also a non-narrative work and features four dancers moving as two separate duets.
Prior to its world premiere in April, Groundworks, the professional dance company-in-residence at Cleveland State University, will present a preview performance of will(O) as part of CSU’s Department of Theatre & Dance’s Spring Dance Concert 2022, March 25-26 at Playhouse Square’s Allen Theatre.
Says Chu of his time with GroundWorks, “I am excited to share this company with the larger international dance community. I am grateful for my time here and am now walking away with a warm heart, a fuller heart, and complete heart because of working with these artists.”
(un|re)cover and will(O), will premiere as part of GroundWorks DanceTheater’s Spring Performance Series 2022 along with a world premiere work by GroundWorks Artist in Residence, and Cleveland-native, Antonio Brown. 7:30 p.m., Saturday, April 9 and 3 p.m., Sunday, April 10 at the Knight Stage at the Akron Civic Theatre, and 7:30 p.m., Friday, May 6 and Saturday, May 7 at the LatinUs Blackbox Theater at Pivot Center for Art, Dance and Expression. Click here for tickets.
