Almost two years ago, Nanette Robinson of ZUZI! Dance Company
received an unexpected visit from Hoshin Gupta, a UA professor of
hydrology.
Science not being Robinson’s usual line, she was puzzled that he
sought her out. Gupta’s research, after all, tends toward creating
mathematical models that predict flash floods. But he’s also a
musician. He plays guitar, and since 2002, he’s led a five-piece band,
the aptly named Water on the Rocks. And he had written a rock opera.
Now he wanted to collaborate with the modern-dance troupe on a
music-and-dance production.
“It was really involved,” recalls Robinson, ZUZI’s artistic
director. The company prides itself on free-ranging
productions—from a full-scale Dr. Seuss show three years ago to
its annual solstice concerts exploring myths and rituals—but a
rock opera would be a ZUZI first. Robinson was intrigued.
“So I said, ‘Why don’t we start smaller?'” The professor agreed, and
the choreographer set to work composing a dance to his song “With Force
and Grace.” The piece made it into the 2007 solstice show, danced by
the ZUZI performers to live music by Gupta and the musicians in his
band.
Robinson was so pleased with the result that she committed her
company to collaborating with Gupta on the full rock opera. ZUZI got a
grant of almost $2,000 from the Tucson Pima Arts Council to pay for the
work’s costs. While Gupta refined the music, Robinson and
co-choreographer Beth Braun, ZUZI’s associate artistic director, spent
more than a year meeting and mapping out the dances.
Like a Lotus Resting in Fire: The Great Dance opens Friday
night at the Historic YWCA for a five-show run this weekend.
“It’s an exciting project,” Robinson says. “It’s very ambitious. The
thing that’s great is it’s a totally Tucson venture.”
Spoken-word poetry, songs, instrumental music, dances on the floor
and dances on trapezes will be performed by 31 artists in the arts
extravaganza.
The 28 dancers include ZUZI’s 11 adult pros and an assortment of
apprentices and kids in the youth company. The three musicians will be
Gupta on guitar, Sally Withers on keyboard and Ironwood Ridge High
School student Trevor Barroero (“a prodigy,” Robinson calls him) on
percussion and marimba. Gupta wrote the music and lyrics, but he shares
credit with Withers for adapting the music for the show. And they both
sing.
Two dancers, getting a short break from the nearly nonstop dancing,
double as musicians during a musical interlude: Monica Weinheimer plays
violin and Audrey Copeland cello.
“There’s dance in every scene, to every song,” Robinson says. “It’s
been a fantastic experience for me and Beth. We’re on the same page
with our vision. I’ll say something, and she’ll say, ‘I was just
thinking that.'”
The opera is about the “journey of life,” Robinson says, and each
individual’s arrival at an understanding of his or her place in the
universe. There are just three main characters. The Fool, danced by
Greg Colburn, is a seeker who is “open to experience, who steps out on
the edge. The Sorceress (Mirela Roza) holds a potion. The Fool thinks
she has the secret of life.”
But it turns out that the Sorceress is on a quest of her own for
self-knowledge. Colburn’s daughter, 7-year-old Sophie, plays the Girl
Inside, representing the Sorceress’ inner child.
The tale was inspired partly by Zen Buddhism—the busy Gupta
also teaches Buddhist meditation—and partly by The Lord of the
Rings, Robinson says. The Fool even carries a ring, which he
believes will protect him.
Colburn is a longtime Tucson dancer, while Roza is a relative
newcomer to town. A Brazilian, she formerly danced with the Municipal
Theatre Ballet in Rio de Janeiro. She quit that gig to join the circus,
Robinson says, and under the big top, she met her husband-to-be, an
American musician. They came to Tucson together. “She’s a beautiful
classical dancer,” Robinson says.
The ZUZI theater has been transformed for the occasion, with the
curtains taken down and the windows exposed and ornamented with stained
glass. Platforms on multiple levels provide space for the multiple
performers and give the musicians their own niche right on stage. The
stark platforms also provide a neutral setting for a story wrapped in
myth and metaphor.
A giant lotus flower—4 feet across—sits right on the
stage.
“The lotus is symbolic in many cultures,” Robinson explains. “It’s a
beautiful flower that grows out of mud. It’s a symbol of what can come
out of the muck—beauty and spirituality.”
The corps of dancers, including Braun and Robinson, represents “the
mud that holds everything together.” Costumed in glittery black, the
ZUZI dancers are stand-ins for the earth, while the kids are dressed in
the bright colors of flowers. For one song, “The Elegance of Ancient
Days,” the youth dancers and apprentices metamorphose into jungle
creatures.
The title song, “Like a Lotus Resting in Fire,” ends the evening,
with “Mother Nature sing(ing) to the audience, invoking the power and
beauty of nature, and all living things,” according to Gupta’s program
notes.
The opera runs about an hour and 10 minutes, with a musical
interlude subbing for a full-scale intermission. The venture is an
early installment in ZUZI’s new program to present live music as well
as dance.
“We’re starting a concert series,” Robinson says excitedly. Marc
Anthony Thompson and Paul Hepker, performing as Chocolate Genius, did a
show on May 2. Company tech director Mark Miceli, whose day job is tech
director at UA’s Stevie Eller Dance Theatre, “made our sound system
concert-ready.”
Now that Rogue Theatre has moved into the gym space on the north
side of the Historic YWCA, adjoining the ZUZI Theater on the south
side, Robinson is envisioning the sprawling building as a “home for
music, dance and theater. We want more music in ZUZI, and there will be
theater in the gym.”
This article appears in May 14-20, 2009.