The Emory Dance Company’s performances each semester act as a vehicle for empathy and understanding, as the medium of dance is inherently vulnerable and intimate. The artform can also be collaborative; at the annual Emory Dance Company Fall Concert, Emory University community members participate in a dialogue between dancers and viewers. The annual event, which community members can attend at Schwartz Center for Performing Arts, showcases the work of Emory’s dance faculty, who choreograph works featuring Emory student performers. The event will run from Nov. 21 to Nov. 23 and includes the works of two guest artists and three Emory faculty.
Lori Teague, associate professor in the dance and movement studies program, is one of the faculty choreographers featured at the fall dance concert. Teague has been choreographing at Emory for 30 years, and her chosen style of dance is contact improvisation, which emphasizes the exchange of touch and weight as the artistic focus. Teague said that her central research question is: “How do we live in our own bodies?” Her upcoming performance at the concert, “Conversation Piece,” delves into this question and explores the struggle of “when a body feels they’re not heard.”
“I wanted to do a piece about very, very difficult conversations,” Teague said. “It really wasn't political, but it became more political as we kept working into the year.”
The dance consists of three sets of dancers performing in duets. Choreography was centered on the dancer pairs, and Teague gave each pair a prompt or question and asked the dancers to improvise a series of movements, also called a “phrase.”
“I said, ‘I'm going to ask you to create a resilient phrase yourself,’” Teague said. “What does that mean to you, to be resilient in the body, to rebound, to have suspension, to be flexible?”
The choreographing process is collaborative, as Teague organizes the dance spatially and temporally using the movement created by the dancers. This piece demands vulnerability from the dancers, and in turn, open engagement from the audience. Avoidance, Teague believes, keeps people from truly understanding one another.
“Something I keep investigating over and over in my work is how to listen through the body, being more quiet, really reading someone, really listening,” Teague said. “Dance is a very dynamic thing. Listening is more quiet.”
Teague isn’t the only choreographer who worked collaboratively with dancers ahead of the concert. George Staib, professor of practice in the dance and movement studies program, structures rehearsals around dancers improvising in response to a prompt. Staib has choreographed at Emory for 23 years, and his current style is contemporary ballet, spliced with what he calls “gritty” and “grounded” movements. He pushes dancers to think creatively, helping them shape their ideas during rehearsal.
“Thematically speaking, I don't get too hung up on what the movements in particular are,” Staib said. “I find I'm more interested in what the frame around the work might be.”
The frame of “Underbloom,” his upcoming work at the concert, investigates the idea of liminality, transition and what happens when ideas don’t quite come to fruition.
“It's when one thing ends and a new thing is about to begin,” Staib said. “It's that middle space. What do you do with that middle space?”
Staib described how the dancers emphasized their thematic ideas by incorporating their “robustly moving” physicality to explore the cycles of effort and depletion.
“They're allowing themselves to be torn up inside the work,” Staib said.
The set design further represents the themes, as seen in the seven large flower stalks of varying heights. Staib explained that the flowers are meant to be moved back and forth by the dancers on stage, representing resilience and the ability to bounce back. Furthermore, the image of the flower represents potential, as a rosebud exists in a liminal state between action — blooming — and inaction.
“The potential is perfect, and it's so elusive,” Staib said.
Julio Medina (13C), an assistant professor in the dance and movement studies program, is also interested in the combination of physical movement and abstract themes. His work utilizes hip-hop, contemporary and non-traditional forms of dance to explore both abstract, cosmic and grounded political themes.
“I'm approaching dance-making now with a lens on how dance can be metaphysical, or how dance can connect us with the universe in an abstract way, but also in a very intentional way,” Medina said.
As a choreographer, Medina pieces a dance together by focusing on its energetic structure and arc, or how energy shifts throughout a piece. He considers the beginning and final images, and the journey that unfolds between those two points.
Medina’s upcoming work at the fall dance concert, “Four Sages,” travels through four phases in its energetic structure. This first phase is a reflection on political ideas such as immigration, capitalism and racism, incorporating a reading of a text by scholar Angela Davis.
The second phase explores the shedding of those oppressive ideals through physicality, transitioning into the third phase, which represents freedom.
The final section returns to the themes explored in the first, utilizing the song “Sage Up” (2018) by activist-artist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez. Through these phases, the work investigates pressing political matters, such as immigration and capitalism, as well as questions of universality greater than any individual
“Just getting back to our humanity — I think that's what I want to do with putting these two ideas together in the same dance,” Medina said.
Ultimately, Medina wants this dance to be left up to interpretation, but he nonetheless hopes the audience views it as an invitation to consider their own beliefs and foster new empathy.
“I'm hoping that after that whole journey the audience can feel like maybe they saw or considered humans as more than immigrants, or even considered the origin of the word immigrant, how that can really affect people's day to day lives,” Medina said.
Teague, Staib and Medina engage audiences through their own styles in the dynamic medium of dance. Their works contemplate distinct questions, yet the pieces overlap thematically. The choreographers are concerned with questions of empathy, connection and understanding, and how these questions are simultaneously expressed in the tangible world and the abstract sense. The upcoming performance — and by extension, dance as a medium — offers audiences, performers and choreographers an opportunity to find new truths in themselves and the world around them.
