Body language: Master Choreographers preview

With a noise like a scratching record, the music in the Brown Dance Studio roars to life—and so do the dancers who make their home there at least four hours a week. Bodies moving like pure sound brought to life, each woman glides through the movements that they and their choreographer, Randall Anthony Smith, assistant professor of modern, jazz, and African dances & cultures, have collaboratively built, smoothly translating beats into steps, harmonies into leaps, and melodies into splayed fingertips. Months of focused and dedicated work has given rise to the work of art that is Fabric of...; a feat all the more astonishing considering it’s just one of seven pieces nearly ripe for presentation at next week’s Master Choreographers.

Running from Feb. 9 to 11, the annual dance showcase is set to be one of the most prolific yet. Featuring the as-yet premiered pieces of an impressive array of both faculty and guest choreographers from Smith to Christina Perera, an award-winning dancer and choreographer from Brazil, this concert will span nearly every type of dance one can imagine.

“I think people [should come to Masters if they] are invested in getting a taste of what dance offers through time in terms of its classicism, moving into this era of modernity, and then also kind of this new age way of thinking and having conversation in terms of not just art, but life,” Smith said. “If they want to see these very distinct points of view that exist historically and evolve through the ages, [that] is something that is very unique to Master Choreographers, and that kind of spice of life is, I think, in a concert like this.”

It’s not only the spice of Master Choreographers that differentiates it from any other dance concerts throughout the year, according to Steph Spiegel ’20, a dancer in both Smith’s piece and another choreographed by guest Orion Duckstein; it’s the process as a whole that makes this one unique.

“Moving Stories, for example, is student choreographed,” said Spiegel. “It’s very different working with a student choreographer than it is working with a faculty choreographer, for obvious reasons. Faculty choreographers usually have their degrees and they have a lot more experience and they’re older, and I think with shows like Moving Stories, Dance Emerge, or Gallery, when they’re student choreographed, it’s kind of like a group effort…we all work together, and I do feel that way in Masters rehearsals, but there’s a very clear [feeling of], ‘This person, it’s their vision,’ and you respect them, and you respect what they want from you.”

Though each choreographer’s final piece will be brought to the stage on the same day, each one had their own particular method of instruction and creation, a fact that dancer Jessica Afflerbach ’19 is all too familiar with.

“The rehearsal process is different for every choreographer, I think,” Afflerbach said. “For example, Trinette [Singleton]’s piece was essentially her giving us choreography and notes every rehearsal and the dance was finished in October. On the other hand, Jeffrey [Peterson] worked a lot in collaboration with all of the dancers and we just finished the piece about a week ago!”

Spiegel echoes this idea whilst describing the nearly semester-long composition of Fabric of….

“…For Randall, he would give us movement and give us choreography to learn, and he would also have us kind of improvise and see what our bodies naturally do,” said Spiegel. “…Then he would go from there and take what he sees [and decide if it] would work with what he already has.”

This sense of intense collaboration was no accident—Smith’s piece is sectioned into two halves, the first entitled Fabric of His Voice and the second Fabric of My Muses. Each half speaks to a different part of Smith’s inspiration and research, sewn together by the sheer will of his dancers and the concentrated energy that runs throughout the room.

“I used to dance for Donald McKayle, and I still work for him as his répétiteur and his assistant when I’m in California…realizing that my history with him has kind of afforded me this really lush, but also edgy and kind of dynamic movement, I wanted to pay homage to the things that I’ve learned from him in terms of choreographic development and not being afraid to be inspired by the music and what it’s saying to me,” Smith said. “The second part is kind of the development that I’ve been working on in my research, which is…tapping [into] the process of working with each dancer as singular, but also plural entities that inspire artistic ingenuity and output… A lot of the work that I’ve done is on muses, and I wanted to return to that, but also be informed by the work that I’ve done with McKayle at the same time. How can I still gravitate towards the music, but also let my dancers really develop the movement and me kind of go in there and pick things apart and change it and reshape it while the dancers can still be themselves in it?”

Whilst watching his rehearsal process, Smith’s words become clearly evident: after a brief self-led warm-up, he carefully selects certain short sections of the piece to work on before starting to rehearse the dance as a whole, periodically giving advice (“Sometimes less is a lot more,” he assures one student) or letting loose shouts of encouragement (an example later emulated by the dancers as they cheer on their friends’ solos).

“The thing that really kind of pumps me up is the actual time that it takes to develop a work. Oftentimes I know my students get upset with me because they’re wanting all these clear objectives and sometimes I’ll be clear and then I’ll change my mind in, like, two seconds, or I’ll forget things because I’ll see a dancer do something and that’s where I’ll take the inspiration from,” said Smith. “It doesn’t live in my physical memory and my kinesthetic memory….I think that’s the part that really fuels me…I live for being in the studio and working with the dancers and whatever the product is whatever the product is.”

When the dance gets into full swing, smiles peek through the women’s focused features, and their movements speak the language of unfiltered joy. Smith, actively observing, understands the words.

You can purchase tickets for Master Choreographers for when it opens on the Empie stage (Feb. 9 – 11) at the box office, online, or by calling (484) 664-3333. Don’t miss your chance to be one of the first in the world to see these pieces live.