Akron Beacon Journal – Stage notes: GroundWorks brings Akron premieres to library (Preview)

By Kerry Clawson, Akron Beacon Journal

GroundWorks DanceTheatre will offer Akron premieres of two dances with performances at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at the Akron-Summit County Public Library, 60 S. High St.

One of them is After Chorus, commissioned from Israeli guest choreographer Noa Zuk, a veteran of Batsheva Dance Company in Israel. Her partner, Ohad Fishof, wrote the music. Both Zuk and Fishof have been longtime collaborators with Batsheva artistic director Ohad Naharin and are master teachers of his Gaga technique.
In creating the dance last summer, Zuk decided to work with the voice and create movement impulses from vocal prompts.

“The dancers actually speak throughout the first half of the piece,’’ said David Shimotakahara, GroundWorks’ artistic director. “I think that was a really fun, creative area for the dancers to work with as well.’’

Fishof composed the music on the spot, in the studio as Zuk was creating the dance for GroundWorks. Zuk’s work represents the first international residency that GroundWorks has hosted.

Another Akron premiere will be Shimotakahara’s Emergent, which was inspired by the idea of complex systems, primarily in nature. The choreographer discovered that the study of seemingly chaotic and random events that accumulate and recombine to create a kind of order is called emergence.Examples include the behavior of ant colonies or the way birds flock — a sort of group intelligence that operates from the bottom up and organizes itself.

“I just really liked the ideas that were implicit in that,’’ Shimotakahara said. “It served as inspiration for the movement of the piece.’’

In his dance, movements keep trying to reassert themselves in seemingly random order, with some things persisting. “I think of the whole creative process of being a sort of emergent idea,’’ he said. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
Finally, GroundWorks will reprise Kate Weare’s Inamorata, which it performed last spring in Akron. The dance, whose title is the Italian word for a beloved woman, portrays male dancers controlling the object of their desire.

GroundWorks just completed a residency with Miami choreographer Rosie Herrera, with her new dance being set over two weeks at Shaker Square, the University of Akron and Cleveland State University. Herrera, who specializes in dance theater, is known for her humor. In her new, unnamed piece for GroundWorks, which will premiere in Cleveland in late February/early March, she had the five dancers working with props including baby dolls, golf clubs and a treadmill.

She had the dancers watch funny Hispanic soap operas featuring overblown characters, and copy their facial expressions. Then she created whole phrases of movement based on those expressions.

“It’s going to be quite an interesting piece,’’ Shimotakahara said. “It’s great. We love new works. It’s what we’re all about.’’

GroundWorks won an Akron Arts Alive! Award for outreach for its collaborative Rite of Spring project with the Akron Symphony and the community last spring. Now, the Cleveland-based dance company has been awarded a $15,000 Knight Foundation grant for its video project “It’s Your Move,” a community initiative that aims to get people from all walks of life involved with dance by sending a video clip of a move or gesture to itsyourmove@groundworksdance.org. GroundWorks will share the best moves on YouTube.

This weekend, the company will videotape Akron patrons doing moves of their choice in the lobby before performances and during intermission.

“Movement is and should be part of everybody’s everyday life,’’ Shimotakahara said.