Bates Dance Festival – Breathing in the Magic
It’s been 21 days since I returned from BDF and I’m still in a little bit of a bubble. I keep walking around in hot, grumpy NYC and wondering why everyone is so hot and grumpy. Then I remember they didn’t just get back from spending 3 weeks in a bubble in Maine where everyone knows your name (yes, like Cheers, but bigger).
The festival was absolutely heart-opening for me. BDF takes over Bates College in Lewiston, Maine for three weeks. We stay in houses or dorms (single or double). I was “Resident Coordinator” for Mitchel House with a single room. Bathrooms are on each floor and everyone shares the common room, washer dryer, refrigerator and microwave. Each day I had a ridiculously amazing breakfast, followed by dance classes with Micheal Foley (Florida) then Kathleen Hermsdorff (San Fransisco), then lunch (sometimes with talks about the dance scene in various cities), then Creative Process with Victoria Marks (Los Angeles) followed by rehearsal with Adele Myers (The choreographer I work with in NYC. She was there as an Emerging Choreographer this year.), then dinner and performances, lectures or showings each night with an occasional night off. Everyone at the festival was open and friendly. Walking down the campus paths to classes you smiled and said ‘hi’ to everyone and they did the same in return.
Going into the festival the first week, I had two days of classes/rehearsal and then Adele Myers and Dancers was off to Stonington, Maine for a performance. Their 200 seat, vaudeville style Opera House was adorable sitting high on a nook overlooking the ocean. Stonington is about three and a half hours north of Lewiston on a little island off the coast. Once we were driving from island to island the landscape was beautiful. Kellie and I drove together and kept yelling, “Gandalf” and “Frodo” as we seemed to be driving through middle earth. We arrived at the Opera House on Wednesday, Aug. 22nd around noon and had lunch on a peer on the water just a short walk from the theater then headed back to the theater for a tech and a show. We performed excerpts from “8 Views”, “Is That All There Is” and “what we have is half of what we wish for” and received a standing 
ovation (I think it was my first). The audience was so gracious and appreciative, it made me never want to come back to New York to perform. That night we ate lobster at another restaurant on the peer where they fished the lobster out of the ocean that morning then headed off to our respective ‘care takers’. The company stayed with different members of the Stonington Opera House board. Kellie and I stayed in their fabulous modern, three story glass house, right on the ocean and left the following morning. It was a 24 hour dream.
Then back to the next dream. We made it back to campus just in time for my favorite class with Kathleen Hermsdorf and the festival continued.
Micheal’s class focused on quick teaching and brain teasers, seeing how fast you could pick up the movement and how much material can be squished into one hour and a half (though we often went over). He usually began with a long stretch warm up, quickly moving into shoulders and back with standing plies and then across the floor for hops, rolls and a handstand or two. His phrases crossed borders of hip-hop, breakdancing, and loosey goosey contemporary (add passe and turns).
Kathleen’s class centered on endurance, improve, inversion and enveloping 3D space (meaning, be HUGE). She usually began with some sort of breathing and/or massage to warm and shock (by slapping) the body into warmth followed by several improvisational passes across the floor focusing on specific areas of the body or words. I really enjoyed this focused improv, it made me really think about body parts or ideas instead of what my body looked like. She then taught short groups of several moves (three or four, not quite a phrase) that would be repeated across the floor (i.e. specific hand stands and rolls, more dangerous turns or flips that it would be hard to teach in mass). The ideas from the improve as well as each move taught across the floor were implemented in the set phrase. The entire class was infused with Albert Mathias’ electronic score. Albert would lower the music when she would explain something and raise it up as people crossed the floor. This created a trans-like state building your energy more and more as the class came to climax. Hrm…yah, it was pretty great. (www.la-alternativa.us)
Vic’s Creative Process class was like little pods of ideas and information. I thought this was perfect for a festival format. Initially, it was really hard to decide to take this course because each day was different. This ended up being one of the main reasons I enjoyed the class. I never knew what we would be doing that day and each day I could take away at least 1 thing and put it in my toolbox. It was really nice to get all these new tools to experiment with now that I’m starting to choreograph again. The overall biggest thing I took from this class in addition to some of the talk backs that were given during performances was to have confidence in my ideas and choreographic process. Your experimenting, and sometimes those things fail, that’s why you experiment. :)
Adele’s rehearsals were pretty great. We don’t usually rehearse five days a week, so that continuum was pretty interesting in how it unfolded day to day. We ended up with a 15 minute trio with sequence tops, a pink shag rug, some serious precision dance and of course, rough and tumble. We’ll see how it turns out in the end; I’m excited for this one! So far she is calling it, “Theater in the Head.” I would love to rehearse with her everyday. We did a showing of this the last Friday of the festival and got some great feedback. (Rehearsal Photos by Arthur Fink *only by clicking next, not back*)
Throughout the weeks we saw, Battleworks Dance Company, BeBe Miller Company, Tania Isaac Dance, various festival international and emerging artists in the final ‘Different Voices Concert’ as well as a improvisational performance by the festival faculty. Showings and informational sessions were on the weekends in addition to rehearsals for various other pieces. I was a work-study participant, so I helped in the video lab and in the theater in addition to my schedule (read: helped = ushering, hoisting, laying, cleaning, moving, 
rolling…yah know, fun stuff). On one weekend I had an afternoon to see the lake beach in town and shop in Freeport a cute little outlet mall, another evening brought on an impromptu make over by Diana and Kellie, but other than that I stuck pretty much to the grounds of my Hogwarts, breathing in the magic.
The festival made me remember why I dance. I love the physicality, the upside-down, reaching as far as I can, spinning and feeling the momentum and centrifugal force and the out of control, the off balance, the risk, that I can speak without speaking…
