Lynne Taylor-Corbett Marquees on GroundWorks' Tenth

GroundWorks Dancetheater's upcoming concert at the Akron Icehouse marks the company's 10th anniversary season and its 9th consecutive September in the Icehouse, but it also marks a quantum leap forward for the company in its latest guest choreographer, Lynne Taylor-Corbett. To understand Taylor-Corbett's importance to the national dance scene, think of Twyla Tharp, roughly her contemporary. Like Tharp, Taylor-Corbett has choreographed for major ballet companies, Broadway, and Hollywood.

Unlike Tharp, Taylor-Corbett never bought into post modern dance and Judson Church; instead, she got her downtown sensibility from Anna Sokolow and disciples of The Living Theater, actors with avant garde, activist outlooks. That's our explanation of why Tharp is more of a groundbreaker (if sometimes obscure in her meanings and detached from emotion) while Taylor-Corbett is more accessible, seldom far from theatrical verities like emotion, character, and narrative.

We were wowed watching a rehearsal of Taylor-Corbett's new work for GroundWorks, something she calls a "theater dance piece" about Virginia Woolf, but her notes to the dancers sparked some questions, so we interviewed her by phone at her long time home in Rockville Center, Long Island, just a short train ride away from New York City where she does much of her work.

Cool Cleveland: In your first e-mail to us you wrote, "I'm really happy that the situation there (with GroundWorks) inspired me to do something that I never would have done elsewhere." You have many other opportunities to choreograph on dance companies, some with high power national presences like American Ballet Theater and New York City Ballet and some, like Carolina Ballet, companies you have long standing relationships with. Why did you choose to create the Virginia Woolf piece, something you must have been thinking about for a while, on GroundWorks?

Lynne Taylor-Corbett: I've known David (Shimotakahara, Artistic Director of GroundWorks) through Ohio Ballet and my work with them. I'd heard about his company and the Icehouse, and this was an opportunity to do a piece that could get lost on a bigger stage or with a bigger company.

CC: Why did you choose to do a dance about Woolf on her last day, the day she intentionally ended her life?

LTC: Somebody said to me, "Oh, Virginia Woolf, wasn't she the writer who went crazy and killed herself?" You have to remember that in her time people didn't have the treatment options that we have now. There were no effective medications for depression or bipolar syndrome. The only treatment then was isolation.

CC: How do you make a dance about a writer anyway?

LTC: This is an imaginative take on her. I said, "What if she were hearing her characters?"

(As Taylor-Corbett walked us through the characters, we found that her intentions had been clear to us, even with our sketchy knowledge of Woolf's life and work. Amy Miller is Virginia Woolf, Sarah Perrett is her younger, impish self, and Felise Bagley is the beautiful Vita Sackville-West, with whom Woolf had a decade-long lesbian relationship. Damien Highfield is Leonard Woolf, her husband.)

LTC: Her husband was, in certain interpretations, a bit suppressive. Of course, he was a writer, too and it must have been a complex relationship. In one section I depict her half brothers...

CC: Ah, yes, the trio with Sarah and the 2 men. Did that refer to her sexual abuse at the hands of her 2 half-brothers?

LTC: Yes. And Kelly Brunk is Julian Bell, Woolf's nephew. In 2 sketches, we see him as a young kid, 14 or so, playing cops and robbers around her house, and later there’s the suggestion that he's killed in the war.

CC: We noticed that during Kelly’s solos you and all the dancers were watching with big smiles.

LTC: He's a very effective performer.

CC: During the rehearsal, we noticed you worked on the timing so that Sarah takes Amy Miller / Virginia Woolf's pen just as the music starts.

LTC: When the action brings the music, cues the music as it were, it's very much as though the dancer is speaking the music – as opposed to the dancer responding to the music a beat later. There's a really big difference in how you perceive that action.

CC: Why did you choose the Howard Hanson music?

LTC: I always think of it like movie music. It's telling you a little story. It was so perfect for me. I felt that her (Woolf’s) mind was tangential, that the thoughts would just pop into her mind and other thoughts would just push those thoughts out of the way; the mood swings of it really appealed to me.

CC: Would you please discuss your mindset in the studio in terms of dealing with different personalities throughout the rehearsal process.

LTC: The question is sort of twofold because trying to control the room is a tricky thing. There are all kinds of ways to be powerful. Some people have a presence that says, "I'm in charge" and my natural personality is not that. I like to be myself in the room and not pretend that I’m other than I am plus the fact that I can't waste the energy, I can't drain that energy away from my thought process. I think that if you are clear enough with what you're doing, that commands the attention of the room, that’s when I feel I'm most successful. It's when it's about the work; do you know what I mean? It's not about making anyone do what I want; it's "This is exciting; help me do this."

CC: How about the ins and outs of casting? Had you thought through the piece to the extent that you’d chosen people for the different roles?

LTC: I wasn't really sure until I walked in the door on the first day, because I really don't know the dancers other than Amy. I think when I saw Sarah I remembered that I had met her at North Carolina School of the Arts but I didn't know that going in and I remembered Damien from Ohio Ballet (Highfield figured prominently in Taylor-Corbett's "Lost and Found" set on Ohio Ballet in 2005) but I didn't know Kelly. And, you know, it's been years so I didn't really know what I was going to do. So when I walked in the vague ideas that I had began to crystallize and morph around those people and personalities. I had said, for instance, "If they have a guy that is young enough I can do the nephew," that kind of thing, but I was prepared to go elsewhere, because there is so much material there that I could have conceivably done it a different way. I think that the collaboration with what is actually real is very important to me; the reason it seems so right is that I didn’t preconceive it in stone.

CC: What about the way the furniture is arranged, the set? Did you preconceive that? It seemed so much like the way they told us to try to do it in scene design class with the eye drawn to the brightest light, the highest value, and the set making the action seem inevitable.

LTC: Necessity is the mother of invention. I told David that I would need a large writing table and I knew that table would dominate the room and the rest of it kind of evolved in terms of what would she do next and it would be great if she went over here and I knew the big diagonal at the end would be most effective if it went in the opposite of the direction from which she entered. So the set evolved along with the action.

CC: You say it evolved with the action but you know our old professor of scene design would have loved the way it ends with Amy carrying that shiny cane off on the diagonal.

LTC: (Laughing) I don’t know who actually picked out that cane. We went to the Cleveland Playhouse scene shop to look through their props and they're very generous. David has other connections, too, people who were willing to look for some of the furniture for us. We found a wonderful scenic builder through the Cleveland Playhouse. So it was put together modestly but with a lot of research and thought. We got lucky in terms of found objects but it's also that David has built up so much good will over the years.

Taylor-Corbett gives a no-cost, open to the public talk at 5:30PM this Wednesday, September 10 at Cleveland State University's Drinko Recital Hall, 2100 Euclid Ave. GroundWorks will appear at the Icehouse Friday and Saturday, September 12th and 13th and 19th and 20th at 8PM (Sunday matinees on September 14 and 21 at 2PM). The Northside Ice/Coal Factory Complex is located at 129 North Summit St., Akron (between Perkins and Furnace St. in Akron's Northside district). Call 691-3180 ext #4 or visit http://www.notsoobvious.com for more info.

GroundWorks Preview

Don’t be fooled by champagne and paper hats on December 31st. The year really begins in September. That’s when people start something new or go back to the same-old. We’ve all got our autumnal rituals, but for us nothing says September like Ground Works Dance Theater’s annual concert at the spectacular Akron Icehouse.

“Raw” and “industrial” don’t begin to describe concerts at the Icehouse. Technically it’s indoors but be sure to dress for the weather and if it rains you can spend intermissions watching raindrops fall thru 50 feet of fly space and onto the puddle at the back of the stage. The only thing that’s inevitable is a freight train lumbering by at least once every evening.

GroundWorks has taken a quantum leap forward this September by commissioning a new dance from Lynne Taylor-Corbett, a choreographer who has established a national reputation over the last 30 years for outstanding work over an amazing stylistic range. Cleveland audiences are familiar with her work for Ohio Ballet, the commissioned work “In a Word” (1992) and her 9/11 piece, “Lost and Found” (2003). National dance audiences know her choreography for American Ballet Theater, New York City Ballet, the Broadway hit “Swing!” for which she received a Tony nomination, and the movies “Footloose,” “My Blue Heaven,” “Vanilla Sky,” and “Bewitched.”

Taylor-Corbett’s announced subject for Ground Works was Virginia Woolf, and we made a point of observing a rehearsal on August 12. That was one of Taylor-Corbett’s last with the group and we arrived a little early to watch the dancers warming up. The 2 men in the piece, Damien Highfield and Kelly Brunk, were practicing compound turning movements; Artistic Director David Shimotakahara stopped fiddling with a CD player and talked with them, gesturing. Their turns became the same and Shimotakahara resumed fiddling with the CD player. Gradually the general warming up coalesced into more specific preparations. Amy Miller, cast as Woolf, got out a tape measure and started positioning furniture props.

Taylor-Corbett arrived and checked out the furniture, at first glance merely serviceable old stuff but on second thought appropriate to Woolf’s ‘room of her own’ in England in the first half of the 20th century. “How are the shoes working out for you?” Taylor-Corbett asked Sarah Perrett. “Have you had a chance to work with a skirt yet?” she asked Felise Bagley. (Period costumes by Janet Bolick were not available until the next rehearsal.)

We barely had time to get out our note pad and take in the set before Taylor-Corbett and the dancers got down to business. There was a strong diagonal of furniture from up left to down right. On the coat rack down right was a cane with a shiny silver head. Vic could almost feel his old scene design professor, Hank Kurth, nudge him and murmur through his whiskers about how that high value metallic gleam would draw the audience’s eyes and make it seem inevitable that the action come down right to that cane. With 4 of the dancers positioned around the set, Miller / Woolf entered from up left and seated herself center stage at the big writing table.

“How do you make a dance about a writer?” we asked ourselves. But we don’t have long to wonder because as Miller starts to bring pen to paper Perrett, portraying Woolf’s younger, impish self, snatches the pen away and commences a lively round of keep-away. As we understand it at the time, Woolf writes by communing with those who live in her mind, her younger self, her husband, et alia – and that’s the dance about a writer that we can see.

The music, American composer Howard Hanson’s “For the First Time,” is at once full of feeling and easy on the ears. As Taylor-Corbett explained in a later interview, “ I guess you could describe Hanson as a Romantic composer; with the rise of minimalists like Phil Glass and Steve Reich, Hanson fell out of style but his music holds up really well and it’s actually played a great deal by orchestras; he’s unique and still holds an important place in American music.”

Expect no detailed interpretations here. Suffice it to say that Taylor-Corbett’s new “theater dance piece” for Ground Works was nothing if not clear, even though we had failed to keep our resolution to read up on Virginia Woolf before the rehearsal. Without gimmicks or sentimentality, Taylor-Corbett goes to the emotional heart of her subject using dance materials that could otherwise be complete in themselves.

Just remember, dear reader, to keep that cane in eyeshot.

Also on the Icehouse program, Miller’s latest choreography for Ground Works, “For the Life of Me,” a group piece with recorded music by various artists. We saw the piece at CPT last March and liked it for its musicality and the deftly managed abundance of dancing.

Also on the program is a piece by Shimotakahara, “Migration,” that premiered at the Icehouse in 2001, where the unusually high ceiling allowed Designer and Tech Director Dennis Duggan to hang huge fabric panels as part of the décor. The lush and exotic score for “Migration” will be performed live by the composer, long-time collaborator Gustavo Aguilar, and vocalist Gaelyn Aguilar.

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

(:divend:)