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Also this issue: Hot and New Bruce Campbell Rosalie Knecht Philadelphia Black Theatre Festival "A Sense of Place" |
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August 22-28, 2002
art
 At the playground: (l-r) Amanda Miller, Tara Keating, Christine Cox and Jonathan Stiles rehearse Imbalance. Photo By: Michael T. Regan |
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“We’re losing time there. You can drop me faster, you don’t have to be so cautious,” dancer Amanda Miller tells her three male partners -- James Ihde, Erik Wagner and Matthew Neenan -- as she steps out of their hold. The foursome is rehearsing an intricate lift that keeps Miller aloft, flowing through a body-entwining configuration, before she is flung to the floor of the Drake Theater.
Flying high without a net is an apt metaphor for Phrenic New Ballet, Miller and Neenan's company with Christine Cox and Miller's husband, dance filmmaker Tobin Rothlein. The trio of Pennsylvania Ballet dancers have for the past two years devoted their "spare" time to taking their shared ballet vocabulary and creating experimental work. This week they premiere two works at Drexel University's Mandell Theater, including Neenan's Die Menscheit (German for humanity), which had Miller demanding more speed from her partners as the piece was still being developed three weeks ago.
A moment later, obeying Miller's notes, the men accelerate the combination and she floats through it with ease.
Neenan and Miller have been partnered many times before, notably as comic dance relief at the annual Shut Up and Dance benefit for MANNA, and their artistic temperaments are completely open to each other.
Cox, the other core member of the company, will choreograph a piece called Ashen for this week's performance.
Phrenic's success has made them a formidable force in the city's dance scene, and in the short time that they've been a group they have covered a lot of artistic ground. They are employing 14 dancers for this program, including many colleagues from PAB. Since the ballet decided to scrub its annual debuts and premieres program this year, the dancers are glad to be a part of Phrenic's premieres.
Phrenic's main problem right now is finding more opportunities to perform. Dance audiences were surprised that Phrenic would not be part of this year's Fringe Festival, but they were not, as rumored, passed over as "adjudicated" artists. They just couldn't fit in a Fringe event with the demands of a separate Phrenic show and the start of a new season with PAB. They did, though, lose out on a grant from Dance Advance, even though they had been awarded by the Pew-administered program in the past.
Still, the members all say they are now about where they expected to be when they organized the company. "The business end is being taken care of by others now, so we can focus more on the artistic end," Miller says. "But it almost seems strange that we don't have to do everything ourselves."
Rehearsing on a sizzling July afternoon, the cast of guest choreographer Jessica Lange's Imbalance is working out the kinks on a cubic seesaw structure that had been developed in New York studio dance workshops. Rothlein uses film projections on a scrim to make the dancers appear to be in mid-air in various animated scenes.
Phrenic's knowledge of ballet is their aesthetic starting point and a point of departure. Of choreographers in Philadelphia, Neenan singularly has the ability to expand on classical vocabulary in precise ways. Like George Balanchine, he can instantly create atmosphere, classically and in variation, with line and gesture. His last full-length ballet, Frequencies, was a hit in its premiere at the Arden Theatre last summer and in a sleeker version at the Wilma Theater's DanceBoom! festival in January. "I had a feeling that Frequencies would be received well, but I thought it still needed work."
The revival of Frequencies was completely realized artistically and the next step for Phrenic is to garner the funding for more repertory. "It was really nice to put that piece back together and perform it again. We probably won't have the opportunity soon," Miller says.
"The second time your body knows it better than ever and it goes to another level spiritually and physically," adds Cox.
In rehearsals a week before opening, Cox’s cast finishes their classical ballet class before they start on Ashen, a daring Sept. 11 movement elegy. “In this case, dancing and music are playing distinctly different roles,” Cox says after the first run-through. “A composer has to tell everything, dance does not.” Cox worked with New York composer Doug Maxwell to create a city-soundscape using world music montages, ambient elements and a concussive audio depiction of the crashes.
“I have trouble every day. I have a newfound appreciation for life and I see things that I’ve never considered before. 9/11 doesn’t leave my head. It’s there in good and bad spaces. It’s hard to say that good things came from that, but, somehow, there were good things that came out of that,” Cox says. “I was not used to working with that many people and I don’t like to waste people’s time. I didn’t want to be sappy or over the top. I really wanted to establish disconnection and connection. This tragedy brought a connection through humanity and I wanted to show that in dance.”
In contrast, Neenan says his new work is as “light as the Mozart strings under it.” The work is a splash of duets, trios and quartets designed classically, but intimately. “My own intention for this was redirected by the music. You start a piece and it already develops this voice and then I have to stick with that voice. Consciously I might think, ‘Oh, it’s time for a solo,’ but even with ‘pure dance’ it becomes a visual story,” he says.
Joining the core cast of Phrenic for this program are Miko Doi-Smith, Erik Wagner, Anne White, Tara Keating, David Krensing, Jonathan Stiles, Francis Veyette, Heidi Cruz, James Ihde and Meredith Rainey.
Phrenic New Ballet, Aug. 22-24, $25, Mandell Theater, 33rd and Chestnut sts., 215-569-9700.
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