Where do choreographers get their ideas? Does the movement or music come first? Sidra Bell, the guest artist commissioned by ODC/Dance for the troupe’s upcoming “Dance Downtown” program, April 10–13 at the Blue Shield of California Theater at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, has an emphatic answer: “All at once.”
It’s a perspective that comes from years of balancing collaboration with individual inspiration.
In an interview with SF Classical Voice, Bell explained that because she’s always on the move, choreographing for companies around the country, she ends up getting to know dancers where they are. “Working on movement is interesting for all of us — riffing, finding new shapes, creating a lexicon and a vocabulary that we can pull apart,” she said. “It starts to reflect itself as we build each day.”
Bell, who founded her influential company, Sidra Bell Dance New York, 24 years ago and was the first Black female choreographer to make works for New York City Ballet, has collaborated with dozens of other troupes, including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Ailey II company and, locally, Robert Moses’ KIN and Alonzo King LINES Ballet. She’s taught at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Barnard College, and Harvard University, among many places, and is a cultural ambassador for contemporary dance around the world.
And Bell brings the inspiration wherever she is. In developing Areas of Relief, her new work for eight dancers premiering with ODC, the choreographer had been listening to MacArthur Fellowship-winning jazz guitarist Mary Halvorson, intending to us her music. “What I like about her is that she’s at the intersection between new jazz and an almost psychedelic form,” Bell said, “from dreamy to strident, not quite nostalgic but soaring. It has a lot of texture to it.”
Areas of Relief consists of three sections: “the possibility of presence,” “where do we stand,” and “folks dance.” Most of the music is set to be played live by Eclecta Quartet with guitarist Liberty Ellman — except for the second section, which will be accompanied by Halvorsen’s recordings.
“My work often is episodic, and there are little stories that happen throughout,” Bell explained. “The dancers [in Areas of Relief] have to be very responsive to changes because the music also has these episodes that are vastly different. I’m creating a line where we know to start here and then why we move there and how people are tracking each other through the whole 30 minutes.”
Bell is collaborating with an artistic team that’s creating a unique environment for the dancers to inhabit. Architect Cass Calder Smith, who’s worked with her before, is designing the scenery, which will be illuminated by lighting and projection designer Yuki Izumihara.
Costumer Kyo Yohena is working her magic in “printed textiles that evoke the Sistine Chapel [and] are like soft etchings,” Bell said, revealing a bit of the process. “We are molding them into different shapes, wrapping tulle and other fabric around the dancers. Then Kyo is at her drawing board figuring how to make them functional.”
Stepping back, the entire “Dance Downtown” program is offering perspectives on how to move forward — not simply survive — in difficult times.
ODC Artistic Director Brenda Way’s Unintended Consequences (A Meditation), commissioned in 2008 by the Oakland-based Equal Justice Society and set to music by Laurie Anderson, is a biting critique of why we become isolated and considers the effects of our country’s obsession with individualism and its rallying cry of “every man for himself.”
Also on the bill is Associate Choreographer Kimi Okada’s Inkwell, which is inspired by Max Fleischer’s dark animation world of the 1920s and ’30s, incorporates music by Raymond Scott and Django Reinhardt, and explores how an unwitting human falls under the power of a demagogue and follows the path from seduction to indoctrination.
