Dance explores diversity

The Oberlin Dance Company's Spring concert offers a diverse lot. Today and Saturday the Dance Company will be presenting four pieces in collaboration with the Repertory Project of Cleveland and the Oberlin Choristers Choir, a group of 35 children. The program is dynamic and exhilarating, and even poignant in places.

The first piece that will be performed is called Motet, as choreographed by Doug Varone. The piece is a fast-paced dance to a recording of Kathleen Battle singing Mozart's Motet K.165, "Exsultate, Jubilate." Three women from the Repertory Project, Greta Fifner, Lisa Hennings and Darcie Robbins, perform this dance. The guest dancer for the Motet is Nusha Martynuk, a dance teacher in Oberlin College's Theater and Dance program. The Repertory Project is Cleveland's professional modern dance company, who are also in residence at Cleveland State University. They are guided by artistic director Susan Miller, and have nine participating members. The group has been active since 1987, and has appeared at Oberlin many times before.

Motet is an invigorating piece. At first the combination of Mozart's classical music with the Repertory Project's fluid and agressive modern dance seems a little odd, but as the piece develops, the music and the dance begin to grow into each other, until it's as if you are watching music onstage. The choreography for Motet is unabashedly physical, with much contact between the performers during the piece. The lighting (by David Ferri and adapted by Pete Koschnick) also contributes significantly to the communication of mood, the vivid blues and reds playing up on startling emotional contrasts in both the music and the choreography.

Following Motet is Room for One, a solo piece by junior Sara Dickie that was originally staged at Spring Back '95. The piece is performed on a large wooden grid, like a triangular ladder. Her feet virtually never touch the ground during the first half of the piece. Dickie explores the dynamics of suspension and all of her movements are precise, showing balance, agility, strength and an amazing awareness of space. It is a thoughtful piece, again aided by some electrifying lighting effects done by junior Sadie Zea Ishee.

A restaging of Lost Stories, a piece choreographed by OC'79 alum Susan Van Pelt, is the last piece in the first half. Lost Stories is a stark, vulnerable piece, meant to express the "sadness of loss and forgetting." The music which accompanies the emotive dance is Henryk Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrows. The Repertory Project members are the body of the dancers (Melanee Darby, Greta Fifner, Lisa Hennings, Ellen Ressler Hoffman, Darcie Robbins, and Heidi Selz), with guest dancers Lars Kramer and Carter McAdams, another OC Theater and Dance teacher. Again, there is much physical contact in the dance, however, in this piece the touching is tinged with a longing, sometimes even pain. It is a vastly moving piece. The lighting is stark (by David Loeser, adapted by Pete Koschnick, the designer for the Repertory Project), as are the costumes, allowing the audience to focus all attention on the intensity of the dancers' movements.

After intermission is the premier performance of Five Songs, Five Dances. The piece is choreographed by Carter McAdams, and performed by the Oberlin Dance Company (students Bec Conant, Debbie Gordon, Sarah Kupperberg, Jill Morgan, Cara Perkins, Amy Beth Schneider and Carey Storan and Yvonne Kimmons, OC '94). Lighting, which plays a very buoyant role in this piece was designed by Jean Davidson, a lecturer in the Oberlin College Theater and Dance Program. The costumes, designed by Chris Flaharty, a professor also at Oberlin, also play a dynamic role in the color of the piece and the overall effect of movement and flow.

At the center of the piece is the Oberlin Choristers Choir, a children's voice group for ages six to 15, and based in the community. It has been going for six years, and the program now includes nearly 200 singers in four choirs across Northern Ohio. They recently performed at Carnegie Hall as a part of the National Honors Childrens Choir. Their voices are pure and they harmonize well. Most of all, they seem to be having fun.

The music of Five Songs, Five Dances was composed by two Oberlin Conservatory students, juniors Sophocles Papavasilopoulos and Alan Tormey, and is performed by the Palatino Group. The music is an adaption of traditional folk songs for South Africa, Greece and Serbia. The innocence with which the children sing these song seems to be the air beneath the dancers feet. The dancers successfully express the emotion of each of the songs, and they, too, seem to be having fun.

The program concludes with Five Songs, Five Dances, and one can't help leaving feeling a little lighter, perhaps even humming one of the tunes, and maybe swaying a little bit. Oberlin Dance Company has come up with a very successful collaboration for this program, and the performance is well worth seeing.