Making Shakespeare Dance and Giving the Folio Feet
Sheryl Jensen
Duluth News Tribune
October 20, 2016
Shakespeare not only gave his actors the most eloquent and poetic speeches ever written to say, he also provided them with opportunities to dance. Many of his plays include references to masques, balls and dancing epilogues where Will’s company members got to kick up their heels with wild abandon.
UMD Theatre Department and artistic director Rebecca Katz Harwood use the theme of Shakespeare in Motion for their fall dance concert to celebrate the Bard’s First Folio, on display at Tweed Museum, just steps down the hall.
The evening includes pieces choreographed by members of the theatre/dance department staff and by UMD students. A fun bonus to the program are interludes of the “Shakespeare Jukebox” with student vocalists performing songs from the Shakespeare-inspired musical theater canon. The songs and vocalists will vary each show of the run.
As is the case with many student showcases, there are varying levels of performance and of choreographic finesse. While there are moments in the student choreographed pieces that seem under-rehearsed, lacking in polish and tenuous in concept and execution, there are also moments when the glimmers of future potential come through as the fledgling choreographers and dancers test their wings and at times take flight.
The evening’s most sophisticated, interesting and bold choreography, however, comes from department members LilaAnn Coates White, Rebecca Katz Harwood and Matthew Wagner.
Coates White’s interpretation of “The Scottish Play” presents an unusual take on the three witches whose symbiotic relationship is displayed in visually stunning reconfigurations of the three women’s heads and bodies. Far from the stereotypical Halloween hags, the witches here are beautiful and seemingly benign creatures, who, nonetheless, manipulate and control Lady Macbeth with her bloody hands and Fleance, the boy who would be king.
“If I Were a Women,” Katz Harwood’s timely and haunting piece, uses Shakespeare’s words on the subject of women echoing throughout. The six women expressively dance the various shades and nuances of being a woman, while phrases like “Frailty thy name is woman. . .” and “Do you not know I am a woman, when I think, I must speak . . .” reverberate to connect text and choreography beautifully.
The concert’s final piece, choreographed by Matthew Wagner, is the evening’s most visually stunning and the most fully realized. Titled “Shipwrecks,” the dance takes its inspiration from “The Tempest,” “Twelfth Night” and “Hamlet” to recreate the whirlwind of poor souls being cast about on a seething sea and then being tossed on an alien shore.
Using a powerful music composition called “Lloyd’s Register,” “Shipwrecks” is also the concert’s best representation of making the thrilling intersection between a perfectly selected piece of music and the themes and motifs of the dance.
Shakespeare himself linked water and dance in his “A Winter’s Tale,” when Florizel says, “When you do dance, I wish you a wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do nothing but that . . .” Wagner’s shipwrecked dancers caught the wave and captured the audience’s imagination.
