Off the fence

Everett Dance Theatre's provocative 'Dream'

by Johnette Rodriguez

One dancer grabs the rolling chainlink fence, flattens himself under it and then spins off into a handstand Another clambers to the top of a fence, where she strikes balletposes, until the first comes back to join her in a fast-motion pas de deux, as they both hang off the fence, which is still moving, pushed by other dancers from Everett Dance Theatre.

This is just one of dozens of sequences from Everett's newest full-length work, "Somewhere in the Dream," which will have its New England premiere at Rhode Island College this weekend. As they've done so well in the past, the dancers collaboratively create an energetic, athletic movement piece, shaped and polished to a fine sheen by choreographer and artistic director Dorothy Jungels.

"Somewhere In the Dream" had its first production in January at the Dance Theater Workshop in New York -- an outgrowth of that presentation was an unexpected $25,000 award from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts -- but company members are now digging deeper into the ideas of the piece, gathering more scenes, and letting others fall by the wayside.

(On December 6, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts officially announced 15 countrywide recipients of their $25,000 no-strings-attached grants, which are intended, in their words, "to provide the financial means for you to engage in whatever artistic endeavors you wish to pursue, to facilitate opportunities for exploration and development and allow for more time free of daily pressures to advance your work." From Berkeley to Brooklyn to Barrington, the awards went to composers, writers, visual artists, dance companies, and poets, including Rhode Island's own C.D. Wright.

(Since she hadn't even known they'd been nominated for the award, Jungels was flabbergasted and thrilled: "This couldn't have come at a better time -- just when we were feeling a bit down-on-our-luck.")

"We're learning even more about the fence this time around," Jungels reflected, during a break from rehearsals last week. "The fences begin more as common fences, connected to each other, setting the background of the ghetto. Sometimes the fences hold curtains for school plays; then they become graduation areas; and by the end they are completely dancing."

Everett has always tended to incorporate props as performers: the chutes and balls in "The Science Project"; the swooshing, twirling, light-enhanced cart in "Body of Work"; and now, in "Somewhere In the Dream," more than a dozen chairs, a set of steps, a small trampoline, a very thick "crash pad," and the fences, all designed to withstand any amount of weight and to move easily in and out of dance and dialogue sequences.

Everett's decision to examine the broad topic of schools and build a dance piece around it grew organically out of their work with young people in the Mount Hope neighborhood. The explosion of enthusiasm they discovered for the break-dance and hip-hop classes they offered at the Carriage House, Everett's studio and performance space, also pushed Jungels and her company in that direction.

"Though we were looking at schools first," explained Aaron Jungels, a company member, the designer/builder of the rolling fences and Dorothy's son, "the piece also came to be about our ignorance, which leads to intolerance, fear and hate."

"It is also about a longing to belong and a longing for home," noted Dorothy Jungels. "We play with the ideas of home and home room. As we began to sort it all out, to connect the dots on a deeper level, we also saw the freedom of those fences to move and the bodies on stage, moving through ideas, and we thought, `What if we moved that quickly, what if we became something else, what if it is possible to change?' "

On quite a different level, Jungels wanted to explore the possibility of different ages of dancers improvising together, of overlaying classical, techno, hip-hop and some original music by Alec Redfearn. After choosing an emotional passage from Adolphe Adam's ballet Giselle to improv to, Dorothy and daughter Rachael got interested in the story behind the music: a young peasant girl, Giselle, is deceived in love by Duke Albrecht, goes mad and dies, whereupon she joins a band of girls who died before marriage, called the "wilies."

Rachael Jungels and Ana Monteiro put together segments of an urban ballet based around the themes in Giselle, Eddie Silvestre took the part of Albrecht and Martin Novogrodski the parts of Giselle's mother and the queen of the "wilies."

"Our work is to create ensembles, so that everyone's stories are equal," Dorothy Jungels stressed. "Balance is so important. Each of the dancers have specific talents. How do we feel when they're interconnected, and how do we do this in a modern way? We like to use quick cross-cutting, like in a film, dissolve and out."

Thus, there are songs that highlight the beautiful voices of Ana Monteiro and Tyeace McRae; a segment that has young Cambodian immigrant Sokeo Ros narrating his family's escape from the Khmer Rouge while he mimes the story through a form of street dance called popping, where every joint in the body moves. One sequence has Novogrodski playing a white Othello to Monteiro's Desdemona; in another, he acts as the talk show host of a program called Blackie and Whitey Together. A classroom scene, with everyone quickly shifting chairs around, has Bravell Gracia arriving to give a lecture but being mistaken for a janitor; in another scene, Gracia models the KKK uniform; later, the whole company does a stepping routine in KKK hoods.

"We had to get past the point of going to uncomfortable places like the KKK and the diversity issues," Jungels recalled. "Humor has allowed us to do that. When we first had the KKK hoods out, we were almost scared of them. Then you think of that power over you -- does using them as costumes take that power away?"

Such questions drive the company forward, looking for answers that are always technically and intellectually challenging.

"This piece is much more current, more demanding than anything we've undertaken before," Jungels emphasized. "But in the end, the piece makes itself."

Onlookers might add: with a lot of help from the members of Everett Dance Theatre.

Everett Dance Theatre will perform at the Auditorium at Rhode Island College on Saturday, December 11 at 8 p.m. and Sunday, December 12 at 2 p.m. Call 456-8144.