Everyone improvises, everyone choreographs in Michelle Dorrance and Ephrat Asherie's freestyle collab
Q: You've just had three performances so far. How's it going?
Dorrance: Wild and amazing!
Asherie: It's exciting to hear the collaborators talk about growing in this work together. It's a very alive process. It is still growing. And the music is extraordinary. When they're not onstage, [dancers are] rocking out to the music in the wings.
Dorrance: Everyone is a contributor choreographically and improvises. These are all freestyle forms. This group of folks is unprecedented. We've never come together before, and watching the exchanges and everyone push and inspire and learn from each other literally onstage in real time is incredible. We're still refining every time we go onstage. We have so many [movement] languages being spoken with full integrity, so many unique styles as well as shared styles being performed.
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Asherie: And everyone is so busy, the fact that [they're] so down for it is a testament to how important this work is to everybody. It's part of a continuum of dances from the African diaspora and Black vernacular forms. It's a beautiful web of how we have all intersected in this complex interwoven world.
"The Center Will Not Hold: A Dorrance Dance Production, created by Ephrat Asherie and Michelle Dorrance," comes to the Cutler Majestic Friday and Saturday.
CHRISTOPHER DUGGAN
Q: You two met 2004 at Broadway Dance Center in New York City and two years later ended up together in the show 'Imagine Tap,' in Chicago. Is that where your friendship really started to grow?
Dorrance: I was so immediately struck and inspired seeing Ephrat dance — her musicality and improvisation, her voice and clarity of execution, athleticism and integrity of technique. I was so taken as an artist how Ephrat was able to express herself. So in early days, I was a friend fan, then we were roommates — we're both pretty high energy and ADD.
Asherie: In 'Imagine Tap,' we used to have competitions to see who sweat more onstage! I've always admired so much the precision and clarity ... Michelle has as a musician and dancer. You just can't fake the funk and everybody knows if you're on it or not. There's such a vulnerability there. No movement can be gratuitous because you have to honor the rhythm and the sound you're making. You have to be responsible for the sonic value and the movement has to allow you to do that. Everything has meaning and purpose, and for me, that is the essence. One of the ways we connect is from an emotional place, an inherent narrative and vulnerability, and that's been a point of intersection for us as friends and collaborators, and that [initial] duet was an expression of that. When tap elder legend Brenda Buffalino saw it, her first comment was, 'This is a whole world.' Now, that world is all these dancers tapping into that emotion and vulnerability in relationship to what's going on in the world.
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Dorrance: Footwork is the intersection of all these forms, but what's unique about the work is the emotion, responding to what is in air right now — fear, oppressive energy, and a lot that is unknown. It's scary, so we hope people feel from the work that there's something at stake.
Asherie: There's moments when you want to celebrate the amazingness of all these artists onstage, then there are other moments that are a little heart-wrenching. I think with the underground scene, the club was a real place of release and freedom, especially in the Black, brown, and queer community, those are the roots. And people were so connected to showing the fullness of themselves because above ground they couldn't. So they didn't leave anything out. You could be powerful and soft, hard and vulnerable. There are aspects of these dances that embody that tension, the push and pull, not having to choose, the vastness of the spectrum allowing all those facets to come out.
Q: With the huge range of dance forms and vocabularies the evening embraces, what ties it all together?
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Dorrance: The interwovenness is very human, with pedestrian movement the audience will identify with. The [movement] sentences are often made up of incredibly complex phrases and a human gesture. Folks are invited into what's happening because of those pedestrian touchstones. Also pulse and groove anchor the work. What innately is our motor is the same. We still are very deeply connected by rhythms.
Asherie: And moments of unison are part of building a kind of abstract narrative, with the idea of dances with shared roots from Africa — so much connection, but they're differentiated with their own music and movement nuances. The specificity is profound, so how incredible that we are able to be in that world but have these moments of coming together. You understand the power and strength of the collective consciousness.
The Center will not Hold, a Dorrance Dance Production
Presented by Global Arts Live, April 25-26, at Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre,
Karen Campbell can be reached at
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