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 By Margaret Regan MOST YEARS, THE members of Orts Theatre of Dance venture out of Tucson in the summer--performing in Costa Rica, say, or teaching in the cool green of Ireland (as artistic director Annie Bunker did last year). But not this year. The company did sneak out of town for a short Mexican tour, but they're at home for the month of June and working out of their new studio, Movement Arts Warehouse, a cavernous space they renovated last year in the downtown Warehouse District.
The collaborations will also carry over to the stage. Orts and 10th Street will put on a concert together at Pima Community College on June 18 and 19; and the workshop students will have their own concert at the end of classes, on June 26. This weekend, however, Orts offers up its own performance: an unprecedented summer concert called Orts All-Aerial Show. The concert, on Friday and Saturday nights at the PCC Center for the Arts, exclusively offers up dances performed on the troupe's trademark single-point trapeze. Robert Davidson, the company's trapeze mentor and frequent choreographer (they like to call him Trapeze God), will also perform a solo. The lineup includes "Ave Maria," a male-female duet by Davidson that looks at the sensuous side of religious austerity. Another Davidson piece, "Inclusae," is an excerpt from Airborne: Meister Eckhart, an evening-long work Orts has performed the last two years running in its regular season. The fuller work is about a theological reformer condemned as a heretic by the church; the excerpt recreates a medieval ascetic practice that called for women to isolate themselves in tiny cells for a lifetime. It's an eerie group piece that has the women moving up and out of darkness at Eckhart's behest. "Bridging Worlds" is an electrifying collaboration between Bunker, capoeira master Dondi Marble and composer Chuck Koesters. Performing with Marble's students, the company first brought it to the stage last Thanksgiving. Capoeira is a rhythmic African-Brazilian martial art form, created centuries ago by slaves rebelling against the authorities, and it's now enjoying a surge of popularity in the U.S. It's full of hypnotic percussive sounds, and the gestures of the capoeira dancers merge surprisingly well with the movements of the Orts modern dancers on trapeze.
"Evolving Reflections" is a mix of dance with video.
First created for the International Glass Arts Society
conference held here two years ago, the piece is about
the magic of making glass. The work captures the process'
many visual delights, from the blaze of fire in the glory hole
to the transformation of molten glass into solid, shimmering
art.
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And they're busy with the Sonoran Summer Dance Workshop,
a first-ever month-long dance institute offered in collaboration
with members of the city's other modern dance troupes.
Classes for adults and kids kicked off on June 2, with
instruction by everybody from Charlotte Adams and Thom Lewis
of 10th Street Danceworks, to Leigh Ann Rangel of NEW ARTiculations,
and Bunker herself.
