CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The February Dance performance by the dance department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will feature works choreographed by four faculty members. Roxane D'Orléans Juste's solo reflects on memory and family ties. Tere O’Connor will premiere a new work presenting the beauty of nonunison movement. Cynthia Oliver's dance examines the journey from depletion to rejuvenation. A piece by John Toenjes combines technology, dance and sound.
February Dance will be presented at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts on Feb. 3-5, and the Feb. 3 performance also will be livestreamed.
Juste will perform “Marassa,” a solo that is actually a duet in disguise. The dance is named for Marassa Jumeaux, the divine twins with healing powers found in Haitian Vodou. Juste grew up in Canada and in Haiti, and she choreographed the piece for herself and her sister, a dancer based in Tel Aviv, Israel.
“I wanted to do a work that would bring her to me and talk about the longing of separation, as well as the strength of communication that keeps her near me at all times,” she said.
The dance is presented in the form of short vignettes that consider the relationship between improvisation and set movement. Theatre professor of media design John Boesche created a luscious visual landscape that carries the audience on a life journey through a projected collage of images of Juste and her sister as children, of Juste’s paintings and of videos of her sister dancing.
Juste creates a movement conversation in her sister's presence, as well as in her absence. This duet leads the audience through time and makes visible the intricacy of sisterhood.
The music selection highlights the works of preeminent 20th-century composers including Haitian composers Justin Elie and Frantz Casseus. Pianist and dance department accompanist Beverly Hillmer will play some of the music live during the performance.
O’Connor examines unison and nonunison movement in “Future Cake.” The dance piece asks the audience to consider nonunison movement as something other than chaos.
“There seems to be a value system in some audiences where people look at unison as beauty and nonunison as chaos. I don’t look at it that way,” O’Connor said. “I’m unapologetically presenting long portions of nonunison movement. My attitude is that it is very beautiful, almost exultant or transcendent.”
“Future Cake” originated from a choreography class that O’Connor taught in which he gave students the experience of creating a dance. The 15 dancers who perform “Future Cake” are undergraduate and graduate students. Each dancer generated their own movement and O’Connor manipulated that material to create specific movements or phrases.
He also composed the score using more than 1,000 “found sounds,” including sounds from nature. The score moves in and out of a conventional relationship between music and dance, sometimes providing a beat and at other times offering sounds that do not mirror the movement on stage, he said.
In her work “Fallow,” Oliver presents a journey from the exhaustion and depletion of creative and intellectual pressures toward a time of restoring health, vitality and creativity.
“There’s humor and struggle and a nonstop aspect to it – all the things we have to navigate to get to a moment where we can be still,” Oliver said.
She described the movement of the six dancers who perform “Fallow” as eclectic – pedestrian and highly technical and funky and gestural.
Longtime collaborator Jason Finkelman arranged the music for the piece. The musicians are Joy Yang on piano – the first time Oliver has used piano music for one of her dances – and Mark White on guitar, who provides reggae sounds. The music reflects “where I am in terms of being in the Midwest and a landlocked place, and my memory of the kind of expanse of the sky and sea that I experienced as an island girl,” said Oliver, who was raised in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands.
Oliver worked with theatre student Yingman Tang on the lighting design – “What she does with color is fantastic” – and with Boesche on projections for the piece.
“Soundwave Surfing” by Toenjes reflects his interest in gaming and stage performance. The work combines dance and technology in a format similar to a TV game show. Six dancers divided into two teams compete by taking turns composing vocal and dance improvisations.
Each short vocal improvisation is immediately recorded and played back, with a screen at the back of the stage projecting the sound wave. A dancer then “surfs” the soundwave by controlling which portion of the vocal track is looped while improvising movement to go with the vocals. Motion-detecting software tracks the dancer’s position on stage, which he or she uses to control which part of the sound wave is being looped. The dancer also can use a Wii controller to lock a part of the vocal improvisation into a loop.
“They can lock a loop and be free to dance around, and then unlock it and make a different loop,” Toenjes said.
The teams in “Soundwave Surfing” will compete in three rounds, with a total of nine tracks. The audience reaction will determine which team wins.
“It gets a little wilder each time,” Toenjes said.
Tickets for February Dance are available online only at krannertcenter.com. Those attending the in-person performances must provide proof of full vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test, and face coverings must be worn throughout the performance.