By Steve Sucato

The latest iteration of GroundWorks DanceTheater’s ongoing exCHANGE program, designed to engage students in the worlds of creative movement, contemporary dance, and kinesthetic learning, took GroundWorks’ teaching faculty this past September to Cleveland’s Bard High School Early College and the Cleveland School of the Arts, as well as Akron’s Miller South School for the Visual and Performing Arts.

The 2-part program began with GroundWorks Education Director, Joan Meggitt, Teaching Artist, Morgan Ashley and several of GroundWorks’ dancers visiting each school to work with students on concepts related to the color spectrum. Those concepts provided inspiration for GroundWorks visiting choreographer Pearlann Porter’s new work for the company, The Visual Sound of Color. In those sessions, students explored physicalizing the differences in light wavelengths that make up the color spectrum including infrared and ultraviolet in a series of movement exercises. 

One such exercise, dubbed “blowing out and sucking in,” correlated with choreography found in Porter’s dance work that related to the push-pull of the dancers’ movements. Another involved a twist on the technique of mirroring, in which one student copies another’s movements as if two were mirror images. Says Meggitt, “Instead of mirroring and doing the exact same thing, we had the students mirror in contrast to one another.” You still had to do the movement your partner was doing but with the opposite quality. So if one person was moving slowly the other had to move quickly, and if one person’s movement was elongated and elastic, the other’s had to be short and choppy.”

At Bard High School Early College the program’s participants were eight 11th and 12th graders from the school’s dance company. At Cleveland School of the Arts, some 28 students from grades 9-12 participated, and at Miller South School for the Visual and Performing Arts, GroundWorks’ instructors worked with a group of 6th graders.

In addition to the movement exercises the students engaged in, students also worked with GroundWorks dancers to create group studies to perform during the second part of the exCHANGE program.    

For Bard and Cleveland School of the Arts students, that second part of the exCHANGE program involved a field trip to Playhouse Square’s Outcalt Theatre on September 30th for an interactive performance and demonstration. There the students participated in a warm-up session before demonstrating for each other and an invited audience the movement exercises they learned in part one of the program. They then performed their group studies. Afterward, the students learned from Porter about her lighting process for The Visual Sound of Color that used projectors and then watched a full performance of the work by GroundWorks dancers to live music. A Q & A then wrapped up the day’s events.

Due to a scheduling issue, Miller South students did not have a field trip as a group but they were invited along with their parents to attend GroundWorks’ Fall Performance Series 2022 show on October 8 at the Knight Stage at Akron Civic Theatre that included The Visual Sound of Color. 

Of the exCHANGE program Meggitt says, “This is the kind of work GroundWorks’ dancers are doing. They are providing insights, talking about their experiences, and are hands on in creating these study pieces with the students. It’s very exciting and inspiring.”

GroundWorks would like to thank faculty liaisons Jennifer Eccher at Bard High School Early College, Amanda Clark at Cleveland School of the Arts, and Ashley Watts at Miller South School for the Visual and Performing Arts. They and their schools were invaluable partners in this exCHANGE.

Photo Credits – Photos by T. Stevens and Morgan Ashley.
(Top-Bottom):
1) Joan Meggitt speaking with students, Bard students pictured
2) CSA students performing their study
3) CSA students performing their study
4) Ahna Bonnette & Victoria Rumzis demonstrating one of Porter’s concepts
5) Bard students performing their study
6) CSA student bow
7) Teagan Reed talking with Bard & CSA students
8) Matthew Saggiomo talking with Bard & CSA students