Suchu Dance: I CAN MOVE SMALL OBJECTS WITH MY MIND

Unite,
Dynomite
and Smite You White Backbiting Mites

We are only one week away from the show! Things are coming together beautifully and we can't wait to share I CAN MOVE SMALL OBJECTS WITH MY MIND with you. Have you reserved your tickets yet? Part of the fun of working on this show has been the opportunity to revisit and transform "Unite Dynomite." It is the third piece of the puzzle that is SMALL OBJECTS, and as part of our "almost there" countdown we share some of our thoughts about that work with you...

The piece, Unite, Dynomite and Smite You White Backbiting Mites was created this past spring for its first performance in the Big Range Dance Festival in June 2010. An excerpt was recently seen at the Weekend of Texas Contemporary Dance at the Miller Outdoor Theater in Houston in September. It is a 22 minute piece for seven dancers in white costumes performed to an original soundscape.

Jennifer offers some insight about the piece: "Revisiting a piece is a little different for me since I like to create something and move on. It has been interesting to see how it has grown from its original form. We have been refining transitional areas that I always felt were a little abrupt and enriching the final group section that previously stayed in the same tenor for too long."

"The sound score has a water motif: drips, bubbles flowing water sounds, but also utilizes air sounds and metronome and clock ticks. The costumes are all white, except they have been sullied on the back. I literally had the dancers wear the pants and sit on some brownish- gray paint. The color white engenders such reverence in people, so I wanted to mess with that phenomenon by making the white costumes already dirty. To me that's humorous."

"Choreographically, I was playing with structures and different ways of making dances. I keep trying to make dances that look and feel improvised, but they never look the same as actual improvisation. Maybe I should just have an improv company."

"The piece has a recurring theme of tiny gestures and movements that resonate when done in unison by a group. There is a motif of the dancers reaching out to one another in the beginning, but they hesitate and don't complete the interaction. A pervading sense of tension hovers throughout, especially in one quartet. Eventually, the dancers do reach out and come together, but in the end they remain apart."

I Can Move Small Objects With My Mind

November 11, 12, 13 and 19, 20, 21
All shows at 8:00 except Nov. 21 at 7:00
At the Barnevelder Theater

Reserve tickets here.

Choreography by Jennifer Wood
Lighting Design by Jeremy Choate
Dancers: Daniel Adame, Lydia Hance, Lindsay Gee, Ashley Horn, Kristen Frankiewicz, Jessi Harper, Leo Muñoz, Nicole McNeil, Prudence Sun, Tina Shariffskul, Lindsey Thompson, and Alex Soares

Huldy Humongous

We are only two weeks away from the opening of I CAN MOVE SMALL OBJECTS WITH MY MIND! As part of the countdown to premiere night, we're giving you some insight on the three pieces that together compose SMALL OBJECTS. This week, we talk about our near, dear, and dangerous Huldy Humongous (aka Wedding Cake!)

Huldy Humongous is a piece for ten dancers in richly textured single-color velvet jumpsuits to music that is vaguely "of the noble hunt" with french horns and percussion, but which devolves to something much more out of control. A portion of this work premiered in the Dance Gallery Festival in Huntsville, TX this October.

From Jennifer Wood: "With this new work I'm playing with symmetry and stasis contrasted with dynamic fluidity. The piece starts out with the dancers creating mirror images along a central axis with a lot of "snapshot" moments."

"The poses are decidedly decorative and I gave the dancers the task of picking the most ridiculous, least efficient pose possible derived from our base movement phrase which is very fluid and loose."