Presenting contemporary dance to touch the soul.
Presenting contemporary dance to touch the soul.
Nothing resonates more viscerally than watching another exquisitely skilled body move with the deliberation and intent to convey the most profound and fundamental human experiences.
Curating an evening of soul-touching dance takes more than a year. At present Boston Moving Arts does not have the content or date for the next performance. Please join the mailing list to be directly informed about the next planned performance.
Past Performances
The great capacity of the heart grows with every soothing relationship and every painful prick of soured connections. Join us on an emotionally charged adventure of love and loss told through the exquisite movement of contemporary dance.
Work Pieces
Chavi Bansal’s quartet is both nurturing and dangerous: holy and spiritual, essential for survival, but also destructive and deadly. Those contrasts reflect the contrasts in her movement: slow and suspended, her quartet of dancers can seem submerged. Elsewhere, they are undulating and whipping hair wildly as if to dry it, or bouncing as if to break the surface. Throughout, her use of common gestures is complemented with movement from Kalaripayatt, an Indian martial art and fighting system that she has studied along with Bharatnatyam, Bollywood, and Indian Contemporary dance. (Bansal gives a post-performance talk on incorporating the martial art into her work after the 2 pm show on Sat., Nov. 9.)
Through small meditative movements, two dancers quietly grieve of “the ongoing need to be near someone, and the memory of what it was like to be near someone who’s now gone.” And like the process of adjusting to life after loss, the movement in to be near you is extended and unhurried, imbued with gestures from daily life but ultimately a reflection.
Master storyteller and choreographer Aysha Upchurch, guides us in reflection of home as both a literal place, but also a feeling and a destination, one sought-after by people who live transient lives. Inspired by her childhood home in St. Louis and “the beautiful things I got growing up in that community,” Upchurch says, “it’s also about having to move to other places, the memories of the places where you grew up, and how we hold onto the love, fondness and discomfort of a home that no longer exists.”
Whitney Schmanski’s intensely intimate and sensual duet is danced to live piano and explores emotional and physical limits of intimacy – how close and how far away from each other two individuals can be. Schmanski says her goal is to portray all sides of a relationship. “I want to show the playfulness between individuals on one side of the spectrum, and the heavier depths each of them faces on the other side,” she says. “There’s a serious tone to every relationship, but we’ve been working, musically, to make it joyful and playful.” The music for world premiere is an original score composed and played by Yang Bao.
A performance that mines the physical and emotional spaces of work, power and love.
Wild type is a scientific term that defines “normal” from a genetic point of view, and how a consistent “abnormality” can become a new normal. Taking inspiration from the idea of norms and individuations, some of Boston’s best choreographers (and one New York guest) present works that reflect everyday internal and external challenges, pressures of work and home, and the struggle between blending in and being erased out.
Work Pieces
Pollack’s World Premiere WORK explores what we do and whom we become in our places of business. Commissioned to work with a soundtrack by minimalist composer Steve Reich, the piece is about the conflict between the relentless momentum of the work we must due to survive vs inertia of what we would like to due to thrive as an individual.
Junichi Fukuda’s premiere DISMELL – named for the biological reaction to an unpleasant smell – reflects the frustrations and disappointments of inequality of power, and being labelled as “other” because of race, sexuality, philosophy, or newness in an established community. Fukuda’s second piece, YOU ARE NOT YOURS (2017), is also a meditation on power, built on an alternating spoken-word and music soundtrack and featuring two dancers — one an aloof, enigmatic presence who seemingly changes genders; and another who moves when manipulated by the other, then independently. Fukuda says the piece comments on contradictions in a hierarchical society.
Joy Davis’s BODIES OF (2017) is a comedic work for two dancers inspired by the power of physics — the physics with which we move through the world, and the quantum physics of billions of particles that move through us all the time.
Adam Barruch’s 2012 work, FOLIE A DEUX (“a madness shared by two”), takes an intimate, intense look at a personal relationship. It explores a couple’s tumultuous life with love and power struggles playing out through alternately tender and frenetic movement. His work has been performed at Boston Conservatory, but with this performance, Barruch and his company Anatomiae Occultii make their Boston debut.