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5 days ago

by lizzie

Headshots are Hard

Yesterday we had a photo session with the wonderful Arn Klein to take some new headshots. My dancers decided to call me “Tyra” as I bossed them around from the other side of the lens. Then I was convinced to take my turn in front of the camera….

I was quickly reminded that I’m a much better behind-the-scenes participant than I am otherwise. There is a reason that I make dances and don’t dance them in front of people on a stage. I’m a wimp! It was an important reminder that what I ask of my fabulous dancers everyday is HARD WORK! Whether pirouettes or headshots, they are brave women and I salute them. Having people look at you critically, from behind a camera or from an audience, is tough! I would rather hide in the wings and think critically than be the body thought of critically. I cannot do what they do and I am so lucky to have them and to have them put up with me when I boss them around.

So, thank you Amanda, Nicole, Meli and Jordana for your hard work in front of the camera yesterday. You are beautiful and strong and I aspire to have your confidence.
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103 days ago

by lizzie

FINALLY! I just posted some videos from our August show, Dancing. I made a little mash-up of each of our new works, Lips of Their Fingers and une elephante. Check ‘em out on the video page and let us know your thoughts!
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120 days ago

by lizzie

Check out my thoughts published in Dance/USA’s eJournal:
Bridging the Gap: The Rocky Landscape of Today’s Dance Business
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133 days ago

by lizzie

WHAT IS DANCE?
by Technical Director & Lighting Designer Joshua Paul Weckesser

I’m going with a few big ideas and then, most likely, discard them immediately. This is the internet, it is my right. I work in dance, it is my habit. Years ago I worked on plays. It was a time, hard to believe now, before cell phones and always-on internet. Even then I was drawn to the real thing, where the simulacrum would not do, to these places where the public comes and sits, the lights dim, the hush and then. And then.

I read Ibsen, I saw Checkov. I quote Shakespeare while watching football (“I hate it, as I hate hell, all Patriots, and Brady”). But all these words, words, words were not enough. Our crown prince said it himself, “can this cockpit hold / the vasty fields of France? or may we cram / Within this wooden O the very casques / That did affright the air at Agincourt?” No, we can’t. Not when the cineplex is down the street, not when the television is in our living rooms, the very internet in our pocket. There are always words coming at us, and so few of them can grab our attention and fill us with wonder, with disgust, with shock, confusion, elation. Most of the time they settle comfortably into the white noise that is the sound floor of our lives.

That is the thing about dancing. You can’t be driving and watch a dance. You can’t be making dinner with dance on in the background. It demands your attention. The only way to consume it is wholly and completely. Which is why bad dancing is so painful to watch, the failure is so complete. There’s no reprieve. The theatre doors are closed, exiting is awkward, as is checking your phone. You have to sit and watch. The other edge of this sword is that amazing dance condenses all of your life into this moment, while your eyes land on that wrist and it flicks here and then rests there. “Of course,” you think, “There it is.” And it has always been there. And a moment later it’s gone.

Chances are though, if you’re reading this blog, you already know all this. But the choir is the easiest group to preach to.

I read once that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” And my first thought was, “Oh, I’d love to see a dance about architecture.” Something so passing, so fragile, so dream-like reaching out for something so solid and seemingly-permanent. The analogies between an elbow and a grand staircase, an ankle and an elevator. The dissonance between what is meant and what is seen. Writing about dance seems about the same.

All of this comes out of Lizzie saying, “You can’t sit with dance the way you sit with a painting.” Comes out of Melissa resting on Nicole’s knee, desperately maintaining her composure while the ground literally shakes beneath her, frantic and then still, trying to do something while someone tries to stop her from doing that thing. Comes out of Laura at the head of a line holding her pants to her right, everyone revealed in the leotards and hidden in the dim floor lamps, the tension rising, the pants dropping, the music starting and the moment has passed. Delicious and sweet, like a remembered candy, like a remembered first kiss.

It comes out of turning a brickwall into a backdrop; transforming a wood floor with a patch of astroturf. Of writing lighting cues on a brand-new console. Turning half a plot and some units on the ground into a fully realized design, a cavernous room into a theater. Of the stress of sitting next to the choreographer throughout the whole run. I press a button and, hopefully, something beautiful happens. If not, there is little I can do. Powerless, I can only watch, perhaps weep, and on this show look to my right into the shock and loss on the face of the prime motivator of the event. It’s a feeling of almost sweating, of sitting up straight for an hour and a half. Standing by and then going. Surely, there are other ways to live, but I do not care to know them.

What is dancing? I don’t know. I never will. That’s why I keep coming back. My thanks to the Leopold Group for asking. For being comfortable in the question, in the doubt, in the incomplete answers. If someone was to ask me, “What is dancing?” I would like to take them by the wrist to this show, sit them on those bleachers and say, “We don’t know either, but watch. The journey is the important part.” Like all great mysteries one answer leads to new questions. Here’s what I can say for sure: You can watch it on the internet, but something that is amazing you turn to your friend and say, “Man, I’d love to see that.” Because the seeing isn’t complete until you’re there hearing the zipper work, the bare foot sound on the astroturf, the ever-present breath, images serve only to whet your appetite. After it’s over you’re left with wonder, like a vanishing dream. You can’t hold onto it, only moments remain, only a feeling. And it feels, oddly, like coming home because we are such stuff as dreams are made of. And we, like the dance, will vanish into air (into thin air).
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149 days ago

by lizzie

PROGRAM NOTES FROM LIPS OF THEIR FINGERS
PREMIERED AUGUST 2011

Lips of Their Fingers grows out of the historic tradition of pantomime as a part of dance. The title comes from a quote about early Italian ballet and its use of pantomime as an outrage. How dare these dancers speak with their hands! Speech was sacred to the tongue. A few hundred years later, this repurposing of body parts provides the basis for modern dance. Lips of Their Fingers calls into use this history, bringing new meaning to good, old fashioned “body language.”

Gradually peeling off layers of clothing, the cast pits intensely physical movement against the most inanimate of objects, a floor lamp or the false naturalness of astroturf, to find delineations between the dance and the body. As the layers fall away, you see both more of the dance and more of the body. Does it become harder to watch the dancing when there is more body revealed? These questions are not unique, they underscore all dances. Lips simply creates a living, breathing, sweating case study to better enjoy these questions.

Staying with the simple in order to see the complex, I employed the most obvious dance moves I could imagine. We Hustle; we Electric Slide; we slow dance. We hope you can use these familiar markers to follow us seamlessly into the more complex modern dance language. We hope this makes it obvious that modern dance is not scary or intimidating. If you’ve ever danced the The Y-M-C-A, you have already accepted the communicative powers of the moving body. Lips is just abstracting these possibilities.

Not wanting to stray too far from the original idea of pantomime, we dove head first into the most dense performance theory text I could find, making gesture phrases out of the words. This seemed to be challenging the idea that one language was more clear or linear than the other. These written words used unfamiliar jargon, created new conjunctions and referenced people and ideas that I had never before encountered. But by translating each paragraph into danced, mimed movement I could start to swallow some of the information. Instead of resigning myself to confusion, the gestures offered tools for digestion. The ideas flow from dance to words and from words to dance. If you find yourself watching the dance with this same mindset, translate.

Upbeat, athletic and a little bit sassy, this dance is illuminating – lamps in hand – what we’ve looked at lots of times.

photo by Matthew Gregory Hollis
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158 days ago

by lizzie

Some Thoughts From Jordan

Last weekend I missed rehearsal. I was up in the Northwoods of Wisconsin teaching yoga to families who were escaping the city for a few days. But Saturday afternoon, I was able to sneak away from the group and I had my own private rehearsal. I might have been miles and miles away from the Chicago Cultural Center, where we have been rehearsing all summer as part of the DanceBridge Grant, but I was rehearsing at the same time as the rest of the Leopold Group dancers back in Chicago. I turned the music on and went through the whole piece, Lips of Their Fingers. I reviewed phrases and marked timing. And even though I was alone in a small cabin in the woods, the message of Lizzie’s dance came through to me. Lips of Their Fingers is a dance about dancing. I was energized. Creating this work over the course of the summer, we have jumped, crawled, turned, fell, leapt, kicked, and wiggled. You name it, we probably at least tried it. Through it all there was excitement in the air. I was amazed to feel that same buzz so far away from everyone. It made me look forward to Monday night when I would get the chance to dance with my fellow Leopold Groupers again. We just finished that rehearsal. Now, more than ever, I am excited to share it with you, the audience.
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166 days ago

by lizzie

DANCEBRIDGE AT THE CHICAGO CULTURAL CENTER
one night, two perspectives

TEHILLA JOY FREDERICK – Leopold Group Summer Intern

Slicked back hair and makeup accompanied harmonizing floral dresses on Nicole and Melissa as they prepared to perform for the works in progress showing hosted by DanceBridge on Thursday.

As they stretched and geared up for Lizzie’s new work, une elephante, a casual discussion ensued about how dance has developed today, touching on everything from Merce Cunningham to the hit TV show So You Think You Can Dance. They are modest about the fact, but Melissa and Nicole can perform switch leaps with the best of them, though they were spared the pleasure during this showing (insert here a hilarious picture of both ladies attempting to do switch leaps and kick-ball-changes with some tap moves peppered throughout). Instead, they tackled Lizzie’s demanding 30 minute piece of choreography. Deep breaths and loose limbs seem to be the key here in order to stick with it and not cave into exhaustion. The dancers proceeded to take the audience on a well thought out journey, with some pleasurable things to observe and some challenging things to take in.

DanceBridge hosts a question & answer session after each presentation, and it was during this time that I found a most thought provoking inquiry. One gentleman asked, “What is the payoff for the audience after watching this piece?” Lizzie answers this question much more eloquently than I can in her program notes regarding this particular piece, but I found myself pondering it long after the performance ended. What sort of payoff do we expect when we go to watch dance? To be enlightened; to be entertained; to be thrilled; to be challenged; to be comforted; to escape…and if we don’t get exactly what we expect are we disappointed? Consider the following statement and its superficialities: In an age where commercial dancing has conditioned audience members to expect a certain payoff at the end of their experience, modern dance has often prided itself for pushing the envelope or exploring new ideas and challenging the viewers by doing something out of the ordinary. In this instance, both dance cultures have been put in a box of certain expectations that, I would say, have formed into stereotypes. What is the payoff and what do we expect to be the payoff when we watch dance? Do we expect commercial dancing to be always entertaining and never thought provoking, or modern dancing to be completely over our heads in its quest to be deep? If we receive something other than what we expected, how do we cope? It can be a beautiful phenomenon; entering into a piece after reconciling the fact that our initial expectations have or have not been met. It is in this place that I believe Lizzie invites us to join her in discovering interesting new thoughts and ideas during her piece une elephante.

AMANDA DYE – Leopold Group Performing Apprentice

I had the immense pleasure of attending Thursday night’s DanceBridge showing at the Chicago Cultural Center and wanted to share some thoughts I had about the pieces I saw, and some topics that came up in the Q & A that followed each piece.

First off, I should explain that DanceBridge is a 12-week residency program at the Cultural Center that generously provides dance companies/choreographers with rehearsal time in its beautiful first floor studio. The residency culminates in a showing of work created during it; in this case, the Leopold Group presented une elephante and Paige Cunningham One Careless Gesture Away From Destruction.

une elephante, choreographed by none other than Lizzie Leopold , is a duet for Melissa Bloch and Nicole Romano Uribarri danced with incredible commitment by both. It begins immediately with bright, spritely dance movement for both women, full of breath (it created such a breeze that one of the curtains covering the studio mirrors fell) and downright pleasant, then rather suddenly and unexpectedly, it devolves into “the fight” as it has come to be known in rehearsal, a series of aggressive, movement task -based challenges that pit the dancers against each other in fierce competition physically akin to a prolonged wrestling match. Relationally, meanwhile, they seem to go from siblings entrenched in intense rivalry to witches chanting an incantation, from parasitism to two people in awe of one another, here tomboys playing, there Siamese twins. Throughout, they cannot seem to shake each other off. This, combined with the physically demanding nature of the different episodes/games/tasks (each with different sonic accompaniment, either music by John Adams, or silence) portray mounting frustration and discomfort for the performers and audience alike, that inevitably comes to a head and is released only as the piece comes to a close.

The Q & A addressed questions of length, repetition, tension, resolution and attention. In this case, did insistent repetition of certain movements and/or sequences allow the viewer the opportunity to see the repeated action with “fresh eyes,” each time discovering some nuance or detail they had missed before? Or was it “too much” for the audience, atientionally, or visually? Did they “check-out” at any point? We all seemed to agree that repetition here was extremely successful in building tension but the verdict is out on whether or not that tension ever fully escalated or resolved, and whether or not the piece’s length served it, or was a hindrance. I suppose we’ll never all agree, these are not questions that can be answered categorically, but there is value in each viewer posing them to him or herself.

(photos by Matthew Gregory Hollis)
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171 days ago

by lizzie

SOME THOUGHTS FROM SUMMER INTERN TEHILLA FREDERICK

This is it. It’s getting to be crunch time. And Melissa’s hair has fallen out again.

The Leopold Group has resigned to be wet and slippery throughout all of rehearsal as they befriend the hot moisture in the air and brightly colored leotards. The cool blue for Natalia, the spicy red for Jordan, the classy purple for Nicole, Melissa gets the soft violet and Laura gets the orange that screams “ha-cha-cha” whenever she goes by.

Being busy with various jobs for Lizzie while interning for her, I have had the opportunity to observe this group in action for the past five weeks as they suit up for their August show.

Posters: check. Costumes: check. The relief felt as the meaning of the dance dawns on the dancers: check. This is the season where separate, seemingly incongruent thoughts start to slide together and dancer and choreographer alike reach the “aha!” moment.

As I struggle to figure out how to make videos of these artists, Lizzie is busy putting periods on the ends of her intricate sentences and smoothing out rough edges (unless they’re meant to be rough, in that case she usually encourages more). Long rehearsals of working out transitions, talking with the cast, and figuring out tricky partnering fill up the time so that hours go by quickly. I walk through the dancers while they rehearse, camera in hand, and catch their animated faces with their expressive leotards. There is more than one reference to the floor which is uncannily similar to a slip n’ slide amidst all the sweat and heat. As camera and faces get close and personal, I’m struck by the simplicity of the dance they are rehearsing, Lips of Their Fingers. The movement is complex and original, holding the attention with layers of choreography and plenty of scenes and props to draw meaning from. But at the end of the day, saucy smirks and smiles are all around as the dancers do simply that—dance! It makes me want to wiggle. The more I think about it the more I’m convinced that the desire I feel to dance after watching this piece is the desire that Lizzie wants to leave with all audiences—and the permission to do so. So don’t be intimidated, wiggle to your heart’s content! I’ll promise to join you.
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177 days ago

by lizzie

WE NEED YOUR HELP! (and click here to watch a video of Lips of Their Fingers rehearsal)

We just launched a Kickstarter campaign to help us make the final push from studio to stage as we gear up for “dancing.”

After much brainstorming, we came up with the best rewards we could think of! We know you can’t resist these one-of-a-kind incentives! Thank you all for your support and generosity.

$10 – A LEOPOLD GROUP TEMPORARY TATTOO (We know you’ve always wanted one. And if you wear it to a Leopold Group performance, you’ll get a free ticket!)
$25 – AN AUTOGRAPHED PHOTOGRAPH OF A LEOPOLD GROUP DANCER’S STAGE DEBUT (Keep in mind most of us started dancing at age 3. These photos are completely authentic and completely embarassing)
$50 – A LEOPOLD GROUP DANCER WILL CREATE A UNIQUE DANCE MOVE IN YOUR HONOR (You will provide the inspiration and direction and we will provide the move. Videotaped and shared with the world, soon everyone will be doing “The Nicole.”)
$100 – A COMMISSIONED VIDEO-DANCE, CREATED & DEDICATED IN YOUR HONOR (You chose the music, the costumes and the theme. We will do the dancing and editing and post a new work in your honor.)
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185 days ago

by lizzie

Although this is a few weeks delayed, I wanted to share some of my biggest take aways from the Dance/USA Conference in Chicago at the end of July. These are just bulletin points so if any of this is confusing, interesting or frustrating – please email me and we can start a conversation – as the biggest lesson was ENGAGE! Dance is no good if I can’t talk about it…

– The average person takes in as many images a day as the Victorian person did in a lifetime.
– The muse is not one of the more punctual beings.
– Think about all marketing materials, social media, etc. as dialogues and not monologues. People want to be engaged and not talked at.
– “The entire dance world has a PR problem.” – Jennifer Edwards
– Google Analytics! It’s free and silly to ignore.
– More than 60% of dance dance audiences are dancers/movers themselves.
– 85% of audiences want MORE program notes and/or on stage introductions – CONTEXT!

In conclusion, create -> discuss <-create
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