Sharp & Fine is the contemporary dance company of sisters Megan and Shannon Kurashige, who will premiere their latest work, A Detective Story, Oct. 18–20 at Z Space in San Francisco.
Seeing a figure in a belted trench coat with one eye peering out from under a wide-brimmed fedora might make an audience groan with recognition, but mysteries are never what they appear to be, and most would never guess where this whodunnit goes.
The Kurashiges have been making dance work with Sharp & Fine since 2011, combining classical and modern forms with original commissioned music and theatrical elements. I sat down with the two sisters and composer Jordan Glenn after a rehearsal of A Detective Story to discuss their current endeavor.
“We started with the group of people we wanted to work with,” explained Shannon Kurashige, who co-directs the production. “It feels very important to build an ensemble [where everyone] trusts each other. We asked [the dancers] what kinds of stories they were hungry to tell, and it was interesting that no one had any specific story or specific theme they wanted to jump into, but we all felt hungry to push ourselves.”
The result was a truly ensemble work. “We wanted each of [the dancers] to have the opportunity to have a character that experiences change across the story as opposed to supporting one central character,” Shannon Kurashige said. “Everyone gets an arc and to be an archetype that supports change in someone else. The dancers brought up the idea of a story that is going along and then it changes and surprises you with what happens — a story that has lots of threads, but you don’t know how they fit together, and then you have a moment where you see how they all come together.”
Cue the music. This is Glenn’s fourth collaboration with the company, and he explained how he began to develop the score once the detective angle was set. “I started just writing some things with this instrumentation [of reeds, cello, guitar, and percussion] in mind, partly because I knew it could lend itself to the detective kind of feel.” What he came up with wasn’t a rigid score so much as a flexible composition dependent upon the choreography. “I would think about who played a rhythm and who played a melody and try to tie some things together depending on which [dance] duet it was or whose solo it was.”
Shannon Kurashige explained further, “Jordan is great about being game to have the musicians moving in space with us, and that’s a treat to have the ensemble feeling fuller, more connected. It would feel weird to just have recorded music that doesn’t change and doesn’t react and is not unique to each performance. And even though it’s composed, there are some improvised parts that are led by Jordan reacting to what’s happening onstage. So it’s not, ‘Oh, press the button, go.’ We ask so much of our dancers to respond to each other, to respond to the story, to respond to the audience in real time. It feels really special and important to have the music do the same.”
Both Kurashiges feel that narrative allows their work to create an intensity of feeling within a readily graspable framework. “Text gives you the ability to have more context than dance alone does and can push the audience and the performers to feel and understand more,” Shannon Kurashige said. “The first time we did a narrative story was the first time after the show that nobody came up to me to ask what [it was] they saw. No one asked me if their interpretation was right. You’re empowering them as observers so [that] they just feel something or think about something instead of worrying whether their interpretation is right or wrong. That is always the goal.”
And because this is A Detective Story, we won’t go into spoilers here. You’ll have to wait for the mystery to unfold at Z Space.
