Culture & Community | Dance | Hamden | Arts & Culture | WNHH
Maxim Schmidt Photo.
The room is silent for a moment, and then bodies begin to move. One rises slowly towards another, then another, and it feels like a slow-flowing symphony. A back arches, and the form is sublime. An arm brushes the floor, and it’s like seeing the limb anew for the first time. Think modern dance back at its roots. Think moving cinema. There is grace in the pauses, all of them, and in the thrill of motion that inevitably follows.
Members of the Annie Sailer Dance Company (ASDC) are bringing that vision to life this week, in two days of dance at Your Community Yoga Center in Hamden. Based on years of modern dance and improvisational movement, the performances will include a number of structured improvisations and one new choreographed work, titled fall down past my shoulder weighted with light.
Dancers include Ginger Chapman, Becky Cline, Lynn Cooley, Sandra Kopell, Yoko Kawai Kurimoto, Elaine O’Keefe, and Sailer herself. Performances are Friday Nov. 1 at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday Nov. 2 at 4 p.m. Registration and more information is available here.
"What comes out of it is extremely strange, sort of nonverbal, dreamlike, illogical, but beautiful connected forms that are very strange but that interest me tremendously," said Sailer, a dancer and abstract painter who launched her eponymous dance company in 1983. "And also remind me of both cinema and a moving painting."
The performance is, in many ways, decades in the making. Sailer—who has danced since she was a young girl—grounds her practice in the Erick Hawkins dance technique, a form of modern dance founded in the middle of the 20th century in New York. After starting ballet and modern dance as a kid, her interest in movement took her to Webster College, where she studied dance seriously alongside studio art, and then to George Washington University for graduate studies in dance.
In 1972, she began training in the Hawins technique in New York City (she credits the late Nancy Meehan, a former Hawkins dancer who split off from the company, as a mentor during that time). By 1978, she was teaching it herself, in a commitment to education that she now thinks of as an integral part of her work. As she deepened her own practice, she developed a style based largely in feel and instinct, which she still brings to her studio and company today.
"I create forms that have a non-verbal, dreamlike, sort of illogical sensibility that to me make sense," she said. "They have to feel right on a gut level."
That's in part where fall down past my shoulder weighted with light comes from. For decades, Sailer practiced between Connecticut and New York, building a group of devoted students and mentees in Connecticut as she also nurtured her company in New York. In the 1980s, her work brought her to downtown New Haven, where she had a dance studio on Chapel Street for several years. While ASDC remained in New York, she traveled between the two places to teach.
When she suspended her work in New York four years ago (Covid-19 made that decision for her) many of her New Haven students returned to practice with her on a more consistent basis. It was with that group—older, yes, but also wiser and as interested in movement as they always had been—that she worked with to create fall down past my shoulder weighted with light. The piece took roughly two years to complete, during which time dancers created, tweaked, interrogated, and revisited movement that they had done together.
"You know, we're not 20-year-olds, but we're an extremely powerful group of dancers," she said. "A lot of the movement in this dance, a lot of the material, has developed during class, when I develop different movement sequences and phrases of material. We've been collecting them, playing around with them, and when we rehearse … I have ideas and images, but basically it’s a process of experimentation and exploring different combinations.”
"We have all these different sections, and then we sort of splice them together and then cut and paste, and try them in all these different orders,” she added. “It’s like a big collage in time.”
After two years, she and fellow dancers are ready to bring the work into public view for the first time. While she's excited for that moment, Sailer said, she also sees the gestation and rehearsal of the work as its own triumph, which she plans to hold onto long after the piece has ended and the audience has left.
In addition to the choreographed work, dancers plan to present three structured improvisations, all based around a specific theme or phrase. Then she will do what she has for decades: begin again at square one, with the bones of a new work that has not yet been born.
"It feels like this is what I can offer in the world to people," she said. "This is what I do."
Maxim Schmidt, who has been documenting the process each week, praised both rehearsals and the performance itself as personally and professionally transformative. A visual artist and curator himself, Schmidt had stopped making work a year ago, after the stress of upheaval in several of the city’s arts institutions.
Then he began to follow Sailer's work, and found himself back in the studio. His creative process came back to him as he followed hers. In mid October, the two shared a studio at Erector Square as it opened up for a citywide celebration of the arts.
"Being able to witness what the dance company has put together, specifically as someone who always felt very close to Annie's artistic process, has just been a really eye-opening and deeply enriching experience for me," he said, adding that it has also changed his relationship with his own body and with movement, both for the better.
"It's been a life-changing experience for me in a way that I don't think I fully anticipated coming in," he added. "I'm really grateful for the collaboration and creative mentorship."
Performances are Nov. 1 at 7:30 p.m. and Nov. 2 at 4 p.m. at Your Community Yoga Center, 39 Putnam Ave., Floor 2 in Hamden. The space does not have an elevator and is not ADA accessible. To listen to an interview with Annie Sailer and Maxim Schmidt, click on the audio above. "Arts Respond" is a collaboration between WNHH Community Radio and the Arts Council of Greater New Haven.