Sharon Mansur + PearsonWidrig

UMD SCHOOL OF THEATRE, DANCE AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES SHARON MANSUR + PEARSONWIDRIG DANCETHEATER: DANCEWORKS

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U-Md. faculty attempt to bring high-concept dance down to earth

By Pamela Squires, Published: February 18

Three University of Maryland dance department faculty members presented new works Thursday at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center that ranged from satisfying to silly. The stated intent of all three choreographies was to produce kinetic landscapes where motion, light, spoken word and visual media had equal voice.

Sharon Mansur and duo Sara Pearson and Patrik Widrig must be exciting and fun to work with because these choreographers burble with ideas and warmly embrace the notion of collaborating with their dancers. There is a lot of intellectual meat on the bones of all three.

Mansur's works dealt with the nature of feminine identity, of light and dark, and the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi that finds beauty in things that are imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. Pearson and Widrig set their sights on the drama inherent in movement and sought to convey a sense of time and space.

These choreographers willingly burden themselves with a difficult task; weighty ideas can sometimes make it more challenging to cross the chasm that lies between an idea and its actualization. Pearson and Widrig's "Drama" for trio and chorus had the easiest crossing, as its focus on pure movement helped it unfold effortlessly. Inspired by dancer Tzveta Kassabova's improvisations, the movement took on Kassabova's incredibly gawky but often original style. At one point, the dancers collapsed like folding chairs as, seated, they suddenly released their torsos forward. "Drama's" best moment came when three suspended boxes suddenly released a rain of gravel that crashed to the floor with terrifying bang.

Mansur is an improvisation-based choreographer, which partially accounts for the loose structures she favors. Her "cimmerian light" work had her walking through a landscape of shade and light contained in bowls, in shimmering cloth and on a glistening wire sculpture that rose 20 feet high. Her site-specific "re(semblance)" piece was performed in the theater lobby. Though the dancers' navigating through the crowd was delightful, the work's theme of feminine identity was obfuscated by such puzzling vignettes as a girl donning a gorilla mask and a woman in a bathtub attaching laundry pins to her T-shirt.

Squires is a freelance writer.

© The Washington Post Company

PearsonWidrig and Sharon Mansur

By Emily Macel Theys

PearsonWidrig DanceTheater and Sharon Mansur // Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center // University of Maryland College Park // February 17–18, 2011 // Reviewed by Emily Macel Theys

Tzveta Kassabova in

PearsonWidrig's Drama. Photo

by Zachary Z. Handler. Courtesy UMD.

Tzveta Kassabova moves as if her limbs are only loosely joined to her body. It’s as though every impetus to fling an arm, hurl her chest forward, or kick out a leg then reverse her torso, sending that leg into a high arabesque, is simply part of the way she moves. Her quirky, somewhat dark Tim Burton-esque movement quality is all her own. It’s no surprise that Sara Pearson and Patrik Widrig used her improvisations as inspiration for Drama, which premiered last month.

The piece lived up to its title with the help of numerous scenic, lighting, and sound elements. But it was the choreography that felt most dramatic, with its over-the-top exaggerations, its cartoon-like and contortionist moments. While Kassabova was not the only performer, the others did not—could not—embody her style. Betty Skeen and Erin Lehua Brown (who, along with Kassabova, made up the core group of dancers) came close, bringing their own suppleness or sensitivity to the movement. But it was hard to shift your attention away from Kassabova each time she lurched into the space or dropped to the ground like a bag of rocks.

And there were rocks too, literally. A thick border of gravel lined the stage; the dancers carefully stepped over it when entering or exiting. (The set design was conceived by Pearson and Widrig with Ryan Knapp and Erin Glasspatrick.) At one point, a box that had hung from the rafters, slightly off-center–stage, gave way from the bottom and spewed out a heap of pebbles. Just when you were hoping the

dancers would protect their feet, Kassabova throttled herself into the pile, curled into fetal position, and became one with the rocks, then continued to dance through them. You could hear her bones grinding against the gravel and the floor, a gruesome and painful experience, and yet she pulled off looking natural, even elegant.

One particularly stunning motif—dancers sitting, facing upstage, moving in and out of varied odalisque poses with an arm placed at the small of the back—recurred with larger and smaller groups. The performers created sensual, womanly shapes but «with disconnected, somewhat deadpan facial expressions. Most of the time they looked at the floor or offstage, so that Kassabova’s one glance toward the audience sent an audible gasp through the house.

Adding another level of drama, the soundscore (by Lauren Burke) included live opertatic-style singing from Madeline Miskie, who moved around the theater— backstage, at the rear of the house, in the adjacent hallway, and eventually onstage —interrupting or infusing the performance with her voice.

The evening was shared with Sharon Mansur, whose cimmerian light meditated quietly on the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi—finding beauty in the imperfect, incomplete, and impermanent. The set, by Felicia Glidden, was exquisite, with its hanging sculptures of wires and paper, lit by the soft glow of lanterns. While the movement was peaceful and pleasing to watch, it hit the same note the whole way through, rarely changing pacing, tone, or depth.

© 2011 Macfadden Performing Arts Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

UMD Showcases Why Academia Is Dance’s Most Fertile Ground

Posted by Amanda Abrams on Feb. 17, 2011 at 4:42 pm

If you’re a serious artist, one of the best jobs you can find is working as a professor at a university. Think about it: you get to spend all of your time in an institution where ideas, rather than profits or power, are front and center. Sure, there’s pressure to produce, but you’re allowed to take some risks, can pick from a sea of talented students and like-minded professionals to work with, and have incredible facilities at your fingertips. Oh, and your day job is based on helping to influence the next generation. No wonder those positions are coveted.

Listen to University of Maryland dance professor Sharon Mansur talk about the two pieces she’ll be premiering tonight and tomorrow night in a shared concert with professors Sara Pearson and Patrik Widrig, and the point is driven home. Much of the country might be in a conservative mode regarding arts funding, but the freedom to experiment still seems to exist in academia.

One of the pieces Mansur will be showing, “cimmerian light,” is a 12-minute improvisation that includes collaborators from several other UMD departments. In particular, she and Andrew Dorman, a lighting designer and MFA student in the university’s theater department, have worked together since last year. “I wanted to

Also involved in the process were Felicia Glidden, a sculptor and MFA student who designed the sets, and Bruce Carter, a faculty member in the music department who created the sound score; he and Mansur discovered a shared interest in improvisation several years ago and spent months together then experimenting in a studio.

So while the piece began as a meditation on light and dark, it gradually—thanks to the various people and inputs involved—became an organic collaboration between artists. “Ideas have flowed from one person to the next and morphed,” said Mansur. “It started to get its own life.”

Her second piece, “(re)semblence,” is a series of musings on feminine identity that incorporates six undergraduate dancers and three professional dancers, plus video and slides. It takes place in the theater’s lobby and is set up like an art exhibit: the audience can wander between dancers and focus on whatever attracts them the most.

And then there’s Pearson and Widrig, a husband-wife team of professors who also run an eponymous company. They’ll be trying out their own experimental material with pieces spotlighting former and current students, including a group of women who serve as a Greek chorus of sorts.

The show, Danceworks, is tonight and tomorrow night at 8pm at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. $25.

Amanda Abrams is a local dancer and a member of the company Human Landscape Dance.

Photo by Tom Caravaglia