Island Moving Company presents
'Consent to Gravity'
By Hannah Benoit
Please note: This piece was written as a preview to the Sept. 15 performance.
Island Moving Company, a Newport-based contemporary ballet ensemble, opens Wheaton's fall 2006 arts season with Consent to Gravity, a collaborative piece inspired by the work of artist and photographer Frederick Sommer (1905-1999).
 Frederick Sommer, untitled. Copyright Frederick & Frances Sommer Foundation. |
The September 15 performance, sponsored by the Haas Visiting Artists Program, is a blend of dance, instrumental music and voice that is as eclectic as the work of Sommer himself. Primarily known for his surrealist-influenced photography, Sommer also painted, drew, and wrote on topics related to art, aesthetics and design. For many years he was fascinated with the visual qualities of musical scores, and he created hundreds of paintings and ink drawings based on them.
It is said that art begets art. In the case of Consent to Gravity, a group of artists have pooled their talents to create a dance piece inspired by Sommer's "musical scores."
The piece was conceived by Thomas Palmer, a Newport photographer who admired Sommer's work and who had often photographed Island Moving Company (IMC) at work. To Palmer, Sommer's drawings evoked images of dancers in motion - wearing bright costumes on a dark stage, or perhaps clad in gray and moving with articulate elegance.
Palmer suggested the idea of making a Sommer-inspired dance to IMC's artistic director, Miki Ohlsen, and the two soon joined forces with two composers, Christopher Eastburn and the Providence String Quartet (PSQ); two choreographers, Carol Somers and Daniel McCusker; and costume designer Eileen Stoops. They named their piece Consent to Gravity, after a phrase from Sommer's writing.
The two composers worked separately on sections of the score. Eastburn set segments of Sommer's writing to music for four voices, while the PSQ chose to improvise from Sommer's photographs and drawings during the performance. The multi-layered work, involving nine dancers, four singers and the string quartet on stage together, premiered at Rhode Island School of Design in March 2005 and later toured to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
"The show is a collaborative art, and, ultimately, interesting and evocative, in an abstract, hard-to-describe way," a Providence Journal reporter wrote of the premier performance. "There's a blending of ... music, delicate voices and wildly different dance. In fact, the piece doesn't start with dancing but with walking - lots of it. Gradually, from octets to duets to solos, there are rising and falling energies and emotions.
"Sometimes the dancers are stuporous; sometimes they're spastic. Often they're tortured and pained; other times, enthused. Such is life, and this art: varied and hard to define."