"A Cold Day in Hades” provided a hot night of entertainment as student and area dancers showcased cutting edge modern movement Saturday evening at the Milliken Auditorium.
Launching an annual fundraiser for the college's new dance department scholarship, the show featured eight pieces and drew 140 attendees. At intermission, Humanities department instructor Dorothy Eisenstein announced that Megan Caplinger won this year's scholarship. Proceeds from Saturday's show will benefit the scholarship for next year.
"[The scholarship] is for a tuition-free class,” said Eisenstein, who has been teaching dance at the college for 12 years. "It's based on merit and outstanding contributions to the NMC dance program.”
Eisenstein began the show with a solo modern number entitled Persephone's Descent, an interpretive acknowledgement of modern dance pioneers including Martha Graham and Doris Humphry. She also directed The Winter Passage, a lengthy piece that melded her student dancers, guest dancers and musician Dede Alderman playing live accompaniment. At the conclusion of the piece, which closed the show, dancers led the audience outside into the winter night.
"I'm particularly inspired by that historical aspect of modern dance, they often choreographed more emotional and expressive modern dances as opposed to something very abstract,” she said. "Especially at the end with Winter Passage, the audience did follow the dancers: we started onstage and went outside and they followed us.”
Eisenstein relishes the opportunity to involve her audiences. While many people attend performances as passive viewers, she believes that watching modern dance is an active experience.
"We like to try innovative approaches to involve the audience in the performance,” Eisenstein said. "It avoids anybody being complacent about what modern dance is, what performance is.”
Members of Movement Unbound also participated in the concert, collaborating on two numbers with two members dancing a third as a duet. The ensemble has a core group of six or seven dancers who have been meeting weekly to create shapes and motion together to music. Movement Unbound member Hughthir White and some other dancers have participated for about five years in Eisenstein's annual spring concert, bringing their unique take on dance to the auditorium stage.
"We're doing improv, definitely very contemporary interpretive stuff,” said Linda Price of her duet with Jessica Sharry entitled Clear Confusion. "It stems from self-doubt and moves through to confidence and balance, acceptance of self and others.”
A dance instructor in the college's Extended Education program, Mykl Werth and some of his dancers and students also participated in the concert. Werth and his team choreographed and danced The Untraditional Tango and Grace in the Air, sleek numbers that showcased their improvisational skills as the couples shifted partners and moved like one organism.
Four of Eisenstein's students danced Rising, an expressive modern piece choreographed by Eisenstein with input from the dancers. Noting that she likes modern dance the best, freshman Samantha O'Brien enjoys the self-expression possible with the discipline.
"Everyone has different views of how it should be,” she said. "In class, we're given four different movements, just basic movements, and then it's structural improv.”
Her classmate Jamaica Humphrey, also a freshman, is getting back into dance after taking ballet classes years ago. Immersing herself in her classes this semester and last - including modern, performance and choreography - she noted that dancing after so many years off has been both a challenging and learning experience.
"I think it's more about listening to your body than being in shape,” she said. "Like you can do so much when you put your mind and body to it - I thought I could do a movement with my body and I could.”
"Anybody can do it,” Humphrey concluded.