artistic directors jamey hampton + ashley roland
Recently, I was fortunate enough to chance upon a performance of Joshua Bell’s at the Oregon Symphony, and the word that immediately sprang to mind that evening was ‘craft’. Here is an individual who constantly hones his skill, dedication to art is a difficult and beautiful medium not easily imitated.
It seems evident that as a violinist must play in order to be representative of the title, so too must a dancer consistently proliferate identity through their own modicum of art. I get the hint of this every now and then when I feel adventurous enough to try a ballet class with no prior training. My brain becomes racked with a conundrum of mathematical counting and proper angularity, as though my legs were knives elegantly poised at careful angles in order to slice garden vegetables.
Conversely, when I drop in on Tracey Durbin's Jazz class on Monday evenings from time to time, the individual dancer takes the front seat in unique choreography. In other words, I can completely go off course from everyone else in the class and label it a deviation into my own personalized artistic oeuvre. The important part is making it look profound enough to suggest that it was on purpose.
In both classes, I can easily see how someone could spend a great deal of time perfecting technique, and we haven’t even reached the concept of artistic expression yet.
Maybe this is what drives dancers when they wake up in the morning. What can my body achieve, what can I convey that cannot be spoken, but needs with absolute importance be communicated? If we seek liberation through physical movement it becomes dually necessary to ask ourselves what the human body is capable of…
After all, isn’t the fore-running potency behind most advertisements for shoes or running pants the innate human desire to realize potential? Why else would we spend such a fantastic amount of money on…say college football, if we weren’t primarily interested in seeing the human body in action, coordination amongst team members fully dedicated to perfecting their physical prowess? There is a kind of art in that, though the goal of most football games might be easier to understand for some than when viewing contemporary dance.
Still, it’s all connected. BodyVox. Body...voice? Communication that defies all attempts to neatly analyze, and yet speaks with such primal force that you really can’t help but feel moved by it. Often literally…
Jon Rasmussen
