The old question, “What did you do on your summer vacation?” prompts some riveting answers from four of Washington’s leading dancers.
Among them, the four have appeared the past few months at international festivals in Taiwan, Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Brazil, Columbia, Peru and Ecuador; and at sites ranging from a barn built by forced labor in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s gulag to a theater high in the Andes where electric power generators, every piece of lighting and oxygen in the wings for the altitude were brought in for the performance.
The dancers offer a striking contrast in their artistic aims and experiences abroad. Nejla Yatkin, vivid onstage and off with her tall good looks, danced dramatic solos on three overseas tours. Maida Withers, on her seventh trip to Russia since 1997, created site-specific work in the gulag.
Dana Tai Soon Burgess, sponsored by the State Department for the third time, brought his delicate, beautifully staged tale of immigration, “Tracings,” to the Andes.
In contrast to these artists who were presenting their own work, Paul Emerson, director of CityDance, engaged in multinational collaborations. He commissioned a piece from a Polish choreographer for CityDance and worked collaboratively with Polish and Latvian composers for works his company danced in their countries.
A force on the Washington dance scene for 40 years, Ms. Withers, professor at George Washington University, founded the Maida Withers Dance Construction Company 30 years ago and has toured internationally to 18 countries. Last year her company performed her multimedia “Aurora” in St. Petersburg.
Her summer tour included the most unusual venue — Solovki, a remote spot on the White Sea marked with haunting echoes of its past: prehistoric stone labyrinths, a 15th-century monastery, structures built with enslaved labor during the communist regime.
Knowing she was going to this charged site led her to begin a new work, “Thresholds Crossed.” “It’s the moment when we’ve crossed beyond reason,” Ms. Withers says. “For example, Abu Ghraib — we crossed a threshold there.”
The choreographer uses images that are now iconic from Abu Ghraib, but she was after the universal, not the political.
“The work is extremely dramatic,” Miss Withers says. “We use the blindfold, we use the tie as a leash, we have a cellist/vocalist cross the stage on a diagonal dragging the cello, playing as she is crawling on the floor and singing.”
Miss Withers refers to this as “the conventional part of the tour,” meaning it was done on a proscenium stage. The rest of her tour involved site visits around Solovki. In one, her group arrived on an island in the White Sea.
“The White Sea is so beautiful you cannot imagine it,” she says. “When the sky of the white nights and the white sea come together you don’t know where the horizon line is; it’s a magical place.”
Paul Emerson founded CityDance a short eight years ago, and his company is about to take a giant step forward as it becomes the resident dance company in the new performing arts complex at Strathmore Hall Arts Center in Bethesda.
Last summer, CityDance toured two cities in Poland and one in Lithuania with 13 dancers and one technical director. On its program was a work commissioned from a Polish choreographer, Jacek Luminski.
Mr. Luminski set his new piece on CityDance using an original score for cello and accordion. CityDance traveled to Poland and performed it in Bytum and Krakow.
“It’s the first time we had a chance to work with an international choreographer,” Mr. Emerson says. “We’re a repertory company, so this is precisely what we drive toward.”
When CityDance traveled to Lithuania to dance, the work had a startling transformation. “With Jacek’s permission we dropped a totally different score into the dance, a full 28-piece orchestral work by a contemporary Latvian composer,” Mr. Emerson says. “It completely changed the piece. The musical duo gave it a starker, more haunted feel, but the second score was huge, with a lot of percussion, so the dancers ended being driven, propelled through space. I thought both were striking.”
The company has toured abroad before, but this trip, Mr. Emerson says, was different. “The frustration and downright anger at the United States were palpable. You could not go an hour after meeting an artist from Europe before they would start talking about ’your government.’ Without going into whether that government is right or wrong, you’re looked to to help show America and American sensibilities in a more human and different light. I’m proud to have the chance to do that.”
Since dancer/choreographer Nejla Yatkin came to Washington a decade ago, she has been creating dramatic solos and an occasional group work.
Ms. Yatkin’s background makes her a one-woman United Nations unto herself. “I was born and grew up in Germany and I’m of Turkish heritage — and my parents are also mixed,” she says. “I live in America, and I represent American art, so to say, with a blend of everything else. America is a country of immigrants, and that’s why I feel so comfortable here, because I can just blend in.”
The dancer made a four-city tour in Brazil in June, appeared at a conference in Taiwan where she performed and gave a paper on the relationship of democracy and modern dance, and last month embarked on a solo tour of Colombia. One senses that her own wide-ranging background helps Ms. Yatkin make connections as she performs abroad.
“I had never toured Latin American before, and the recent tours showed me how mixed their culture is,” she says. “When I went to Brazil I didn’t expect it to be so German and Spanish; I felt I was in Europe. In Col-ombia, too, there’s a lot of immigration from the Middle East mixed with the Mediterranean, and also native Indians.
“In Colombia I danced ’Echoes,’ a very theatrical, 40-minute long piece using a poem by the German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. It’s about experiencing the life cycle. People were moved; there was an emotional connection.”
The blending of cultures is also central to the work of Dana Tai Soon Burgess. His mother is of Korean descent, and his full-length “Tracings” reflects the journey of his ancestors to labor in the pineapple fields of Hawaii. His company performed the work in Ecuador last month. The dance uses slide projections of pineapple fields and, in one section, sculptured shapes of pineapples.
“One of Ecuador’s main products is pineapples, so that image is completely part of the mind-set of the culture,” says Mr. Burgess. “We danced in Peru before that, and there are Japanese Peruvians whose ancestors came to be agricultural farmers at the same time the Koreans came to Hawaii, so there’s an understanding of an Asian diaspora.”
Here in this country, Mr. Burgess says, the work is first categorized as having a narrowly Korean-American perspective, whereas abroad it is understood in a larger sense of immigration.
“When we show it abroad,” he says, “people say they relate to it from the experience of being from another land and having to make a new life. So it shifts to the larger macrocosmic view of the work first.
“Every time we tour another country I realize more and more what a specific, unique language modern dance is and how much it can ultimately convey beyond cultural boundaries and political borders.”
Where these artists can next be seen:
CityDance Gala with Rasta Thomas and Levine School of Music faculty quintet, Nov. 4 at 7 p.m., Russian Embassy, 202/347-3909, www.CityDance.net
Dana Tai Soon Burgess and Company in “Tracings,” Nov. 5 at 8 p.m., Lincoln Theater, 202/328-6000
Nejla Yatkin in a solo program that includes “Echo,” Nov. 13 at 8 p.m., Nov. 14 at 4 p.m., at Dance Place, 202/269-1600
Maida Withers Dance Construction Company (with Nikolai Schetnev from Russia, who appeared with her company in the gulag) at the DC International Improvisation Festival, Dec. 3 at 8 p.m., Betts Marvin Theater, George Washington University, 202/974-0739
CityDance in its debut performance at Strathmore Hall, Feb. 17 at 7:30 p.m., 301/530-0540, CityDance 202/347-3909, tickets on sale Nov. 1
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