Ground Works Dance heats up the Ice House

Since 1999, Ground Works Dance Theater performances in the Akron Icehouse have been memorable as much for setting as for choreographic content. A true landmark building, the 129-year-old Northside Ice/Coal Complex features great sight lines, 50 feet of fly space and minimal barriers against the urban environment. Rain, heat and cold have a way of penetrating inside the Icehouse and freight trains rumble and clang past outside.

This year's program features the world premiere of a new work by Artistic Associate Amy Miller in collaboration with Oberlin-based composer Peter Swendsen. We’ve admired all of Miller’s previous choreographic projects with Ground Works, the way her sweetly serious demeanor as a dancer translates into emotionally grounded pieces that keep the dancers moving in complex and interesting patterns. We hear that the current premiere has involved meticulous back and forth between Miller, Swendsen, and the dancers.

Also on the program, Open Seating, one of Artistic Director David Shimotakahara’s best early pieces. We can still remember our first look at Open Seating, a Thanksgiving morning rehearsal (in 1998?) for a showing of the work-in-progress. Ground Works was still a pickup company then, relying on moonlighting Ohio Ballet dancers. The entire dance, performed by 4 dancers with 4 chairs, takes place within a taped-off square 20 feet on a side.

"I thought about the kind of work we needed, where we were likely to present it," explained Shimotakahara at the time. “I ended up with a square which the dancers never leave. I don’t need wings and a curtain. It can work without a lighting plot. Things move along because of what happens in the piece. To me it’s about that space, a microcosm within which people interact.”

Music for Open Seating is by Gustavo Aguilar, long-time Director of Music for the company. It includes thematic repetition of a vinyl recording of Tres Parables, a popular Mexican standard, and live performance on toy instruments, bike horns, and mayonnaise jars. “I have to get the sound I hear in my head,” said Aguilar.

Rounding out the program, Tipping Point, choreographed by Seattle-based KT Niehoff.

Ground Works Dance Theater performs at the Akron Icehouse, 129 N Summit Street (between Perkins and Furnace Streets), Akron, 44304. The program is featured on 2 weekends, September 11 – 13 and September 18 – 20, 2009. Friday and Saturday performances are at 8PM. Sunday performances are at 2PM. $18 General, $12 Students and Seniors. To purchase tickets phone 216-691-3180X2 or visit http://www.GroundWorksDance.org.

PlayhouseSquare Dance Showcase

Every September, PlayhouseSquare presents a FREE Dance Showcase. Linda Jackson, former dancer, dance teacher, and Artistic Associate with Cleveland San Jose Ballet and currently Education Program Manager at Playhouse Square put it in a nutshell in a recent phone conversation. "It's a wonderful program with a great variety of dance companies and dance styles," she said, "a chance to see the great dance that Northeast Ohio has to offer in one great performance."

One company in the Showcase, Foreground Dance, is so new that even dance geeks like us have yet to see them. We gather that they're based in Columbus, Ohio, for Ohio State University is the common denominator in their bios. With a website and a reputation under construction, they do have a leg up in that Co-Artistic Director Yu Xiao is the 2009 recipient of the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for her choreography. Is Yu's dance, The Night, worth watching? We needn't drive to Columbus to find out, for they're in the Showcase.

Another company in the Showcase with roots in academia is Travesty Dance. Founder Kimberly Karpanty and her colleagues go back to their days together at Kent State University and we've been watching them for many a year. Most recently, we saw Karpanty's Plenty at Cleveland Public Theater, an ambitious, sprawling piece about mental illness that managed several intervals of brilliant choreographic insight into this difficult subject. Can Karpanty and company manage wit and humor in Go on, then, their offering in the Showcase? We would guess that they can, but again, we need not drive to Kent to find out.

Another group -- a pair, really -- that we've seen intermittently over the years is Dance / Theater Collective's Lynn Deering and Joe Booth [pictured]. Low key and whimsical, at their best they can be very, very funny performers. Their offering for the Showcase, Bare Feet in the Park, sounds like just the kind of thing they can do well.

Inlet Dance Theatre's young professional modern dancers have mastered, among other techniques and styles, Pilobolus-style partnering, which allows them to build improbable structures out of the dancers themselves. But it's seldom dance for the sake of dance; Artistic Director Bill Wade and company usually make it all mean something.

Memoriate, Inlet's new original work, is concerned with issues facing the elderly and their caregivers. Long-time Clevelander Ryan Lott, now based in NYC, composed the commissioned score, using sound bites from interviews and sampled kitchen sounds.

Dancing Wheels performs Mark Tomasic's A Wing / A Prayer, a dance we've seen a number of times. It's a powerful piece, one of the best testaments we know to the possibilities of dance for other-abled performers.

Verb Ballets performs Ginger Thatcher's Urban Study, which we'd describe as a contemporary ballet that successfully assimilates jazzy Africanist elements. If you don't enjoy watching Verb's dancers in this piece, we'd advise you to avoid all contemporary ballet in the future.

Also on the program are 2 companies we're much less familiar with, Antaeus Dance and Ohio Dance Theater. We know next to nothing about Antaeus' Drift In, Drop Out performed to the music of Philip Glass and the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and even less about ODT's Spindrift. But that's the beauty of PlayhouseSquare's Dance Showcase, a time and cost-effective way to look at local dance companies and see how we like them.

The PlayhouseSquare Dance Showcase is presented at 7PM on Fri 9/11 at the Ohio Theatre in Playhouse Square, 1501 Euclid Ave. The performance is FREE and no tickets are required. For more information, go to http://PlayhouseSquare.org/community or phone 216-348-7509.

From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas. Elsa and Vic are both longtime Clevelanders. Elsa is a landscape designer. She studied ballet as an avocation for 2 decades. Vic has been a dancer and dance teacher for most of his working life, performing in a number of dance companies in NYC and Cleveland. They write about dance as a way to learn more and keep in touch with the dance community. E-mail them at vicnelsaATearthlink.net.

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