(HOST) Commentator, teacher and film producer Jay Craven says that a dance performance coming to the Hopkins Center may offer an intriquing glimpse of the future of the performing arts.
(CRAVEN) I’ve worked in the arts in Vermont for 33 years, but I frequently find myself wondering what the future holds. Arts funding is scarce here – which makes me worry that young people won’t take up the call. When I look around at audiences for theater, dance, and independent films, I mostly see baby boomers my age – or older. There are exceptions, of course. I know young people who take in all that the arts offer – and they’re glad they did. Inspired mentors also nurture kids, through the Young Writer’s Project, Vermont Young Playwrights, Brattleboro’s New England Youth Theater, Circus Smirkus, The Voices Project, and the Vermont Youth Orchestra, to name but a few.
A key question is also how professional artists are developing new aesthetic forms that reach and challenge younger adult audiences where they are – especially given many younger people’s social concerns, including racial and gender diversity. Can a whole new arts generation engage people the way Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp, Miles Davis, Harold Pinter, Peter Brook, Sam Shepherd, and Robert Rauschenberg excited earlier generations, spawning whole new languages in dance, jazz, theater, and visual art?
The inventive and provocative British dance company, DV8, IS reaching new audiences and it’s the buzz of the contemporary dance world. Unlike many troupes, DV8 is not about rendering otherworldly beauty on stage. Part dance, part physical theater, the company creates compelling narratives, at once realistic and hard-hitting, poetic and surreal. DV8 includes young and old dancers, some with unlikely body shapes and handicaps.
DV8 artistic director Lloyd Newsom makes clear that his company’s work is "about something." His vernacular is social, political, and psychological. In his latest work, To Be Straight With You, Newson leads a multi-ethnic cast in an inspired and unflinching exploration of tolerance, intolerance, religion and sexuality. Based on 85 interviews collected throughout the UK, with people directly affected by these questions, he incorporates dance, text, documentary, animation, and film.
The London Guardian describes moments on stage – quote – "A 70-year-old woman who has lived through testing times spins across the stage like a top. A man skips, so light on his feet that he nimbly dodges the rope that might trip him up – just like his own father who cornered him in an alley when he discovered his son was gay."
The London Times calls the show – quote – "a stirring, possibly angering and sometimes saddening collage of views and stories from a small army of people embodied by nine dancers… But it is human feelings and political themes – fear, courage, hatred, injustice, invisibility, compromise – that matter the most here."
DV8’s To Be Straight With You will perform one of only three U.S. dates at Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center this Friday and Saturday night. The event is being billed as groundbreaking performance – and part of the college’s forum on conflict and reconciliation.