Last night’s soft opening of Firebird, a new immersive modern dance work being staged at Off the Walls Arts through August 7, was a paradox: using only the simplest of forms and set pieces, it transported the audience to new realms.
Staged in the same space that once housed the elaborate Baron von Opperbean’s Exploratorium by Christopher Reyes, the contrast couldn’t have been greater. Where neon forests and planetary landscapes once stood in the former exhibit, there now stands a stark, spare area, stone gray except for a few black arboreal forms and a vivid mural of a phoenix on one wall. At one end, velvet curtains hang.
Those curtains were the only real indication that the space has now become a dance stage. Some audience members even clustered on the floor informally at the foot of the curtains, while others sat in folding chairs behind a strip of tape that established the edge of the performance area.
“This blue line marks the edge of the action,” one usher noted to those of us in the front row. “There’s going to be a large swinging structure. Stay back or you might end up with someone in your lap.”
Being perched on the precipice of the performance made it all the more effective when the lights went down, the aggressive techno-flavored opening music revved up, and the five-person ensemble burst out from behind the curtains, ferociously dragging a large spherical framework. From that point on, we were transported.
The spherical frame proved to be a versatile structure for myriad movements, inspiring vigorous dance and gymnastics from the performers. While the piece may have been sparked by The Firebird ballet that premiered in 1910, there was not a hint of Stravinsky here. The music, composed by Michael Wall, a faculty member at the University of Utah, varied abruptly from pounding industrial jams to gentle, ambient sound design, making for sonic contrasts that perfectly matched the stark lighting and shifting movements.
Meanwhile, the dance itself, choreographed by Neile Martin and Ashley Volner, embraced such contrasts, from gritty interpersonal struggle to the tenderest of romantic duets, sometimes in the space of a breath. The dancers — Martin, Volner, Aiyanna LaRue, Kimberly Madsen-Thomas, and Connor Chaparro — gravitated to the sphere, dragging it to and fro, climbing it, imprisoned by it, sometimes abandoning it altogether as they moved across the space. And then it was done, the entire work lasting only about a half hour.
Reluctant to shake off the spell cast by the dancers, I spoke with Off the Walls Arts founder and set-builder Yvonne Bobo and the choreographers to hear how such a piece, unmoored from any established dance company, came to be.
Memphis Flyer: Yvonne, in your opening remarks, you said you envisioned a space that fostered interdisciplinary arts. Could you expand on that?
Yvonne Bobo: I’ve been doing sculpture on my own for a long time. And when I left Crosstown, I was looking for a building where I could be long term, and where other artists could be. A lot of us are working on the outskirts by ourselves. So I bought the building, not knowing what would happen. But we have, including this group, thirty artists in the building. Dance, woodworkers, mixed media, photographers, sculpture, everything.
Recently, I met Ashley at a friend’s house, and I ran into Neile at Memphis Rocks, and we all were talking about Elizabeth Streb’s choreography, using big metal structures. So I said, ‘Why don’t we do a collaboration? I’ll build the structures, you guys dance.’
Ashley Volner: The third piece is actually a tribute to one of Elizabeth Streb’s dancers who passed away about two months ago. I’m from Memphis, but when I lived in New York, I ended up working with Elizabeth Streb in JAMPack’d, which is a company under her main company. I also train upper level gymnasts.
There’s a lot of gymnastics in Firebird. It reminded me of Cirque de Soleil in places.
AV: Yes. And we have incredible gymnasts in Memphis.
So this piece was inspired by The Firebird?
Neile Martin: It’s a Russian folk tale, but you see phoenixes and firebirds in a lot of mythology. And when we started looking at the story, we knew we wanted to use a story that was familiar, to make modern dance feel more palpable to people who aren’t sure what they’re supposed to be thinking or feeling when they see modern dance. We’ll use something that people know, and then play in that framework of a familiar story. Something that came out in the past couple weeks was the dynamic shift when something powerful meets something equally powerful, and they recognize in each other what it means to have that kind of power. And that’s the struggle that occurs between the sorcerer and the firebird at the end. And out of that recognition of self and self, comes kindness and forgiveness and acceptance.
YB: That moment is very powerful, when they come to forgive. The quiet moments are as strong as the loud ones.
NM: What does it mean to have such a burden of power? What do you do with it? What do you want?
YB: That’s what’s interesting about the sphere, too. You feel all the pieces that are moving. You think there are two sides to a story, but there are so many more. And you see them all.
NM: The language and vocabulary of modern dance gives us freedom to express that complexity with a larger physicality.
Even in modern dance, you don’t always see works so driven by the set pieces. Maybe in work by Meredith Monk or Twyla Tharpe.
NM: Yeah, Twyla’s quite a force to be reckoned with. But it also comes down to the brilliance of Yvonne. [To Bobo] You hearing us talk, and then making Betty…
YB: That’s what we call the big structure.
NM: We named her Betty. But she’s Liz when she’s feeling feisty.
YB: What’s funny is, that was my mom’s name. They just coincidentally named the structure Betty. And my mom liked to be the center of everything.
NM: Seeing Betty for the first time, our vision just took off from that moment.
AV: I think Neile immediately climbed on it. There was no verbal response at first, it was just like this frog climbing up.
It evokes jungle gyms and childhood. And when you’re a kid, in a jungle gym, that’s your universe. You can create a million stories in that structure.
YB: To be inside, to be outside, even to be trapped inside. And then get out! It’s an orb that’s a cage; it may just be an idea, or magic. It’s a sentiment.
But also liberating: climbing upside down, or climbing to the top.
YB: Yeah, getting really high! Like when you’re a little kid and get brave enough to get to the top. You’re king of the orb, right?
The audience seemed absorbed the whole time.
YB: This is our soft opening, which sold out, and that was a little daunting. We were like, ‘Great! Oh crap! It’s happening!’
NM: That’s what I love about performing live. You get to live in the moment. And then you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s done! Okay, I’m gonna do it again.’
The rawness of the space evokes venues in New York where I’d see performances in the 80s, like P.S. 122 or warehouses that hosted performance art. It creates that feeling of an urgent, urban wellspring of creativity that you don’t always get in Memphis.
YB: As a public artist, I feel like the committees, the approvals, the calls, all the things where they tell you what they want you to do, it’s like they dilute us over and over again. There can be so many stages of approval that there’s just nothing left to look at. So when I imagined Off the Walls, I thought, why don’t artists run a nonprofit? So what I see in Firebird is, artists want to do stuff! But where are they going to do it?
NM: There’s no other place in Memphis that’s an incubator for professional artists to have time and space to play and build to create a product like this.
YB: And I have no idea what we’re going to do next.
Firebird Immersive Modern Dance runs through August 7 at Off the Walls Arts, 360 Walnut Street. For showtimes and to purchase tickets, click here.