Latest news with #Tides'
New York Times
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
John Jasperse Starts La MaMa Moves! Honoring a Female Lineage
It begins with a line of women in black dresses, advancing toward us. As the tide of their bodies turns back, one more woman emerges through them. She holds our attention with both otherworldly fluidity and a flashing of claws. She points at us with casual command, then shimmies. As she walks away, she looks over her shoulder with the tiniest of smirks. Something witchy is happening in John Jasperse's 'Tides,' which had its premiere at the start of the 20th anniversary of the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival. Much of the magic derives from the casting. The pointing woman is Jodi Melnick, who has been bewitching audiences for decades. Later Vicky Shick, another veteran spell caster, wags a finger. But the hidden force is Jasperse, a choreographer whose compositional skill and artistry channel the talents of these exceptional performers into the special sorcery of contemporary dance. 'Tides' honors a particular lineage. Melnick, Shick and Cynthia Koppe have ties to the postmodern luminary Trisha Brown, an early Jasperse inspiration. Younger dancers in 'Tides,' Maria Fleischman and Jace Weyant, have been students of Jasperse and Melnick. As the dancers combine and recombine or line up together and shield their eyes from the moon, there are suggestions of the older dancers taking the younger ones under their wings. Some drama comes from Hahn Rowe's oddly aerating score, which ranges from poltergeist noises to techno beats. Ben Demarest's lighting lines the sides of the stage for sections that resemble catwalk modeling, illuminates the back wall to highlight dancers curiously conjoining body parts and partially blinds us with oncoming headlights. But the main charge of 'Tides,' one of the most engrossing dance works I've seen this year, comes from the choreography: a strong structure kept supple and alive with little slippages and surprises. 'Tides' made for a thrilling but incongruous start to La MaMa Moves, which continues though Sunday. The festival is customarily a home to the fledgling and never-quite-arrived ends of experimental dance. A premiere by Jasperse, a major choreographer whose work has appeared at major theaters like Brooklyn Academy of Music, could be read as an anniversary treat and an act of generosity — or as a troubling symptom of a dance ecosystem in crisis. Two shared programs this past weekend were back to festival business as usual: a lot of first-draft ideas and one undersung delight. In 'dance for no ending,' Jesse Zaritt and Pamela Pietro tried all kinds of things — entering along the walls as if playing a vertical game of Twister, hurling props onto the stage, wrestling, drawing, making ironic announcements through a bullhorn. None of the zaniness, though, was actually fun or funny. Jordan Demetrius Lloyd is a thoughtful, talented choreographer when he has multiple bodies at his disposal. But his solo 'Mooncry' was vanishingly thin. After some throat-clearing business of entering and exiting the stage, he read names of audience members and threw mints at them. The work, he said while standing on a pile of books, was research into crying. But the research seemed to be in early stages, hitting on a strong idea only occasionally, as when he wittily hung a wig on a microphone stand next to a fan. In the other shared program, Megumi Eda addressed intergenerational trauma in her solo 'Please Cry.' Her grandmother was a nurse in the Japanese military during World War II but never discussed the experience. She taught Eda not to cry. We learned some of this as Eda livestreamed herself and talked to her dead grandmother on her cellphone, shared home movies, wore a nurse's coat and thrashed against a wall. A standout dancer decades ago in the company of Karole Armitage, Eda remains striking, but the work was inchoate. That kind of deficiency is to be expected from this festival, but so are discoveries like Nic Gareiss. A virtuoso step dancer in Irish and Appalachian traditions, Gareiss isn't unknown in New York: He's been presented at the Irish Arts Center and last week at the Uptown Rhythm Dance Festival. Nevertheless, he's an underexposed treasure. At La MaMa, Gareiss was joined by Alexis Chartrand, who plays French Canadian fiddle tunes on a Baroque violin. Gareiss scuffed and scraped the sanded floor, easing into fancy flatfooting and tucking in surprises like knocking heels and clicking toes. Much of the time, he stayed in place with his feet directly underneath him and danced, as it were, under his breath — murmuring, whispering. He spoke of his collaboration with Chartrand as a 'meshing of sonic intimacies,' and so it mainly was, starting quiet and getting quieter. At one point, Gareiss, an unassuming charmer, made a comment about being in an experimental theater and gave audience members permission to express themselves in 'noises of pleasure.' He also mentioned being 'a petulant queer child' who rebelled against his Irish dance teacher's prohibition against scraping feet. In those two comments, perhaps, was an answer to how a traditional dancer like Gareiss (out and proud in a traditional field) fits into the frequently undercooked avant-gardism of La MaMa Moves and how he quietly invigorated it.
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Wing-T offense coming: Jeff Scoma ready to shake up Gig Harbor football program
Gig Harbor High School running backs, rejoice: the Wing-T is coming. Jeff Scoma, who was announced as the Tides' new football coach this week, is bringing a run-first offensive scheme to the program. It worked at Stanwood High School, where Scoma took the Spartans to the Class 3A state tournament twice in 2021 and 2022. Prior to his arrival, Stanwood hadn't played in the state tournament since 1996, marking a 25-year drought. 'Coming out of covid, (Stanwood) needed a breath of fresh air,' Scoma told The News Tribune on Friday, a day after finalizing paperwork with the Peninsula School District to officially accept the job. 'The kids were fantastic. They did a great job learning the Wing-T and learning our offense. … It was a great group that wanted to embrace what we were doing.' Scoma grew up in Peoria, Illinois, and played baseball in high school. He graduated from Arizona State University before moving to East Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he worked in the corporate office for Kellogg's cereal company. He eventually made his way to Washington, where he started a Seattle Team Shop company, which sells Seahawks, Mariners, Sounders, UW and WSU apparel. Currently, Scoma owns Soccer West, a soccer retailer in the Starfire Sports complex in Tukwila. Scoma's wife, Sydney, grew up in Tacoma and attended Stadium High School. Scoma joined the football staff at Bellevue High School as an assistant after moving to Washington. He took the head coaching position at La Conner in 2020 for a year before jumping to Stanwood. After putting Stanwood back on the state's football map, Scoma stepped down from the job a month into the 2024 season after Stanwood had gotten off to an 0-3 start. He declined to go into specifics about the decision. 'Just a quality of life decision,' he said. 'I don't want to go into the details.' He resurfaced shortly thereafter as a consultant for Michael Kneip's Bellevue High football team last fall, helping the Wolverines reach the 3A state championship game at Husky Stadium. Scoma said it was a good chance to recharge. 'It was great,' he said. 'The culture there is special. The coaches are outstanding. Top to bottom, it's arguably one of the best coaching staffs in the state. There's a certain mindset, expectation, work ethic there. It was good to be a sponge and just absorb.' Bellevue is where Scoma received his education as a coach and the program's fingerprints are all over his philosophy, from player buy-in to the Wing-T offense. He plans to bring the offense — which is also used by local 2A power Tumwater — to Gig Harbor. 'Bringing the Wing-T, but we'll do some things that are different,' he said. 'Some things people won't expect. I have to assess the talent, make some adaptations and changes based on some of the kids we have at each position.' Expect things to look very different than in past years, when Gig Harbor has looked to spread the ball out. Gig Harbor's most recent major success came under now-Auburn High coach Aaron Chantler, when the Tides played at a dizzying tempo and threw the ball all over the place with quarterback Davis Alexander, who was the TNT's 2015 All-Area player of the year. Scheme aside, Scoma said culture building will come first — and he thinks the foundation is in place to build a good culture at Gig Harbor. 'It's a quality school district,' Scoma said. 'Really good history, good booster club, great feeder program. Some nice periods of success, kids that have gone on and played college football.' Success may not come overnight. Gig Harbor plays in a competitive 3A Puget Sound League Narrows Division, which features perennial Top 10 program Lincoln and rising Mount Tahoma, which has played in the state tournament quarterfinals in back-to-back years under Keith Terry. 'It's probably one of the tougher (leagues) in the state,' Scoma said. 'But it's all about us. We have to be the very best version of ourselves.'
