Some of history’s great works of art are products of disaster. When the pandemic sent Lake Tahoe Dance Festival virtual last summer, founder and artistic director Christin Hanna made a commitment to support her diverse cast of artists through the 15-month shutdown of their industry. These commissions led to a series of new choreographic works, which will debut at the ninth annual event in Tahoe City from July 27 to 30.
“We had to figure out some way to turn this into a benefit. That’s human artistic survival. No matter what the circumstances are we have to find some way to lift up what it is to be alive. It’s our duty as artists to persevere whether we succeed or fail, to do our absolute upmost and to keep on striving.”
–Constantine Baecher
Festival co-founder Constantine Baecher found his inspiration from a 1921 poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay entitled, “Wild Swans.”
“It has to do with the whole idea of how we communicate,” he says. “As artists, Covid isolated us. But it also brought people together in ways that under normal circumstances no one would think of doing. The piece is about the proximity of understanding one another.”
Drawing from both the overall meaning of the poem and an analysis of each word in isolation, the New York artist worked remotely with dancers Traci Finch and Holly Curran and French composer Ulysse Zangs to choreograph and score the surrealist piece, “Duo/Duo.”
“I like to work in opposites,” says Baecher. “It’s the idea of spending every day alone and on the flip side, being in connection with people all over the world. It became clear early on that it was going to be about how people find each other in isolation and the ways in which communicating can lead to misunderstanding. Throughout it there is this knife’s edge: Are the dancers on the same page or are they ships passing one another in the night?”
During last summer’s virtual festival, Kristina Berger and Erik Wagner hiked to a precipice overlooking Emerald Bay for a photo shoot at dawn (featured on this edition’s cover). As they watched the sunrise reflect on the lake, Berger was reminded of a Swedish word roughly similar to toodle-loo that her mother used to say. At that moment, the diamonds on the water sparked the inspiration for friendship and an original work called “Tjingeling.”
From their home cities of Boston and San Francisco, Berger and Wagner began meeting virtually in hopes of capturing the visual splendor of light dancing on a liquid surface as a reflection of hope and beauty.
Lake Tahoe Dance Festival
July 27-30 | Gatekeeper’s Museum | Tahoe City
“During a time of full-on crisis and devastation, I can’t think of anything more exciting than to focus on something so elegant,” says Berger. “That is what we hope to communicate through our movement.” Numerous other works are scheduled to premiere at the in-person festival.
Christopher McDaniel dances a 14-minute solo choreographed by Durante Verzola to Tchaikovsky’s “Variations on a Rococo Theme.” The composer himself called rococo “a carefree feeling of well-being.” Verzola seeks to illuminate this feeling with the swells, crescendos, tempo changes, romanticism and style found in the music.
Christin Hanna and Stephen Hanna perform a new piece by Italian choreographer Marco Pelle, who hails from the same hometown as Giuseppe Verdi. Set to the composer’s music, 120 years after his death, it is dedicated to the memory of Wilhelm Burmann, their larger-than-life dance mentor who passed away last year due to complications related to coronavirus.
Tahoe native Jack Blackmon will perform an untitled new work that he likens to “building a cathedral and finding a way to renovate it into a red-velvet-curtained jazz bar.”
Texas artist Jehbreal Jackson worked with Ashley Bouder to choreograph a story of the relationships between major civilizations of antiquity. The music of Johann Sebastian Bach serves as the score and a formal compositional tool to explore how concepts of counterpoint, harmony and dissonance can be used to construct our cognitive inner and outer worlds.
The festival is preceded by a three-week intensive course until July 30 for dancers ages 10 and older, which offers training with festival artists and an emphasis on classical ballet, modern technique and improvisation.
“Shakespeare wrote some of his best plays during the Black Plague,” says Baecher. “We had to figure out some way to turn this into a benefit. That’s human artistic survival. No matter what the circumstances are we have to find some way to lift up what it is to be alive. It’s our duty as artists to persevere whether we succeed or fail, to do our absolute upmost and to keep on striving.” | laketahoedancecollective.org
The Tahoe Weekly is a sponsor of the Lake Tahoe Dance Festival.
