Dancing on a Knife Edge with Inlet

Bill Wade has been a presence on Cleveland’s dance scene for decades, first as a dancer for Footpath Dance Company, then as that company’s artistic director, then as the founder and director of the YARD, a company made up of student dancers from Cleveland School of the Arts. For the last decade or so, Wade’s been running his latest creation, Inlet Dance Theater, which is built around a nucleus of young professional modern dancers.

Inlet’s performance aesthetic is part of their charm, capitalizing on dancers with a certain glamour and more than enough technical capacity for the task at hand. The company’s mastery of Pilobolus-style partnering adds to the mix, building improbable structures out of the dancers themselves. But it’s seldom dance for the sake of dance; Artistic Director / Choreographer Wade and his artistic associates usually manage to make it all mean something.

The theme for Inlet’s upcoming concert at Cain Park seems to be meditations on culture, cultural identity, and cultural values. “Out of Nowhere,” created on the company last spring by guest choreographer Stephen Wynne, could be described as a meditation on changing cultural values, a theme that Wynne brought to the collaboration on his own initiative. As Wade tells it, “Stephen asked what kind of piece I was after so I said, ‘I want to drop you off at my studio and stop by the end of the day and see what you’ve done,’ so he started playing with the dancers and set “Out of Nowhere” on them from scratch; it’s a really good fit; it’s very theatrical and it has a lot of social psychology in it; with his European, tanztheatre background he’s coming from a very different place than what’s normal around here.”

Also on the Cain Park program and coming from a very different place is “Dances from Rapa Nui.” Like most dance companies, Inlet travels to residencies, engaging in teaching and other cultural exchanges as well as performing. Recently they completed a most exotic cultural exchange with Easter Island, as Wade describes it, “the world’s most remote inhabited island.” With the help of the Ohio Arts Council International Artists Exchange Program and a host of other high profile sponsors, Wade and some of his dancers made 2 trips to Rapa Nui, as the island’s indigenous people refer to Easter Island. In between those 2 trips to Rapa Nui, two traditional artists from Rapa Nui – traditional choreographer Akahanga Rapa Tuki and dancer Joanna Pokomio -- made a trip to Cleveland.

Wade explained, “These are dances that the Rapa Nui have been doing for 100’s of years, dances that date back to the monoliths and cannibalism! In one of the dances we’re literally telling the opponent who’s just landed on the island what we’re going to do to them – kill them, eat them, and take their powers.” Welcome, tourists!

Another piece grew out of an Inlet residency closer to home. Instead of cannibalism, the dance dealt with elementary school math class. Again, as Wade tells it, “We were doing a 2 week Ohio Arts Council residency at West Elementary School in Athens, Ohio; the principal said she wanted us to draw on our Easter Island experience so we created ‘West Elementary Island,’ based on the kids’ answers to our question, ‘what do you do during the day?’; the kids said, ‘we have math, lunch, recess and so on’ so we created choreography for each activity they named; Josh’s math piece (Company Member Joshua Brown’s “Math”) turned out to be stage worthy so we’re putting it in the KidzArt matinee.”

We watched a rehearsal of “Math” in the dance studio of Cleveland Heights High School where Inlet is holding their annual Summer Dance Intensive. In very Pilobolus-looking passages, the dancers, teens and young adults, personified various mathematical operations. For ’18 divided by 3,’ the dancers held hands in 6 groups of 3 dancers each. “Lean back into your circle,” Brown instructed them. For ‘positive and negative numbers,’ the ‘positive’ dancers emerged from one side of the stage, smiling and walking with smooth, ebullient steps, while the ‘negative’ dancers emerged from the opposite wings with eyes cast down and staccato heel stamps.

“I would have liked math a lot more as a kid if we’d done things like this,” Wade commented. “Educators are struggling to put left and right hemispheres of the brain together so when we come up with something like this, I think, ‘Dear Sesame Street…’.”

We also watched rehearsal for a new hip-hop dance created for Inlet by Leilani Barrett. Currently based in Los Angeles after a long tenure with the YARD and Inlet, Barrett’s resume also includes a stint with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. In both rehearsals, Wade pointed out dancers who were “everything from SDI Students to Trainees, Apprentices, and Company Members, intentionally blurring the lines.”

That’s another aspect of Inlet’s Cain Park concert that goes a long way toward explaining its perennial popularity. Student dancers are presented alongside professional company members and somehow the mix results in an aesthetically satisfying concert rather than a student recital.

Inlet Dance Theatre performs FREE at Cain Park Evans Amphitheater. KidzArt matinee is at 1PM Wednesday, July 23, 2008; the full concert is at 8PM Thursday, July 24, 2008.

From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas vicnelsaATearthlink.net
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