One knows spring is upon us when Cornell's artistic offerings turn to dance. The Center for Theatre Arts annual rite of spring, Dance '96, will present four perfor mances, March 7 to 9 at 8 p.m. and March 10 at 2 p.m. in CTA's Proscenium Theatre. Tickets are $8; $6 for students and seniors. For more information, call the CTA box office at 254-ARTS.
Always a challenge to the conventional, Dance '96 will feature the choreographic work of CTA dance lecturers Jim Self, Byron Suber and Jumay Chu, and senior dance major Christine Doempke.
Self's piece, "Suites: Dummy Dances For Love and Money," features the choreographer and three other dancers in a dada-inspired experience of random alliterative text and movement. As Self states in the text, "This is a shrine to dancing iguana consciousness, this is an art-barking dummy display." Dada was an artistic movement which was based on deliberate irrationality and negation of traditional artistic values.
In "The Gism from the schism of the isms: hey but where's the egg, Mama? (in truncated form)," Suber juxtaposes the aesthetics of movement with the quantitative theory of mathematical indeterminacy. While none of the movement in "Gism" is predetermined, it is not impro visation. There is order to this chaos. Together with the dancers, Suber created a complicated sequence of movement that included 412 different steps and eleven phrases, as well as directional, sequential and orientational twists. While Suber out lined this concept of the fractal dance, it is up to the dancers to meld the fragments creatively into aesthetically pleasing, fluid movements, to balance the complexity and order inherent in the process.
"It is like a jigsaw puzzle," explains Suber. "We mix up the phrases, steps, sequence and direction, and then we try to put it back together. I like to think of it as graceful twister." In addition, Suber has been writing text that reflects the same indeterminacy of the movement, lighting and sound.
In a contrast to Self and Suber, Chu's construction of movement revolves around an animate object rather than an intangible concept. Using a sculpture by Ithaca artist Kumi Korf, Chu strives to create an abstract interpretation of a tangible place. "I'm finding it to be challenging because I am not used to working in these concrete terms," Chu said. "In the end, though, it is about movement, technical movement, and not the object." Chu worked with Allen Fogelsanger, director of music for dance, to create the music for her piece.
For her final endeavor as a dance major at Cornell, Doempke has choreographed two pieces. In her solo, "intro -- a version," Doempke creates a footwear metaphor for her aversion to speaking. Her group piece uses the dynamics of sporadic light and the sound of a metronome as well as a group of rock climbers who will be scaling the set as part of an exploration of memory and musicality.
Dance '96 is coordinated by Byron Suber with a design team of Susan K. Hein, stage manager; Ken East, scenic designer; Cynthia Ann Orr Brookhouse, costume designer; Michael Williams, lighting designer; Ad vanced Undergraduate Theatre Associate Dan Caffarelli, sound engineer; and Dan Hall, technical director.