Fresh start Stepping into a new space at PC BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

Providence College Dance Company’s annual Blackfriars concert will christen the new Smith Center for the Arts with modern dance pieces by guest choreographer/dancers as well as resident choreographer/dancers. Guests are Michael Bolger and Eva Marie Pacheco, from Island Moving Co.; Cathy Nicoli, formerly with Groundwerx Dance Theatre; and Caitlin Trainor, who is based in New York City. PC faculty who are choreographing and/or performing are Kristen Horrigan, Wendy Oliver, and Christina Tsoules.

Tsoules is new on the Rhode Island dance scene, having moved here in the fall of 2003, fresh from an MFA at Smith. She teaches at Salve Regina and Festival Ballet as well as at PC. She’s presenting two works, one set on nine dancers from the college, The Living Room, and the other a new solo/work-in-progress, Anamnesis. The latter opens the concert and appropriately initiates the new performance space by paying homage to a performer’s love of a theater’s components.

Tsoules interviewed many of the theater’s technicians as well as dancers at the college to come up with text which she and Paige McGinley shaped to accompany Tsoules’s movements. McGinley speaks the first-person voice-over, with occasional live comments by Tsoules.

"Since I will be the first to perform in this theater," Tsoules observed, during a recent rehearsal break at PC, "I wanted to ask myself questions: ‘What are our first memories of being in a theater? What is it about theater that draws us? What kinds of ghosts are here?’ "

The title of this dance means the opposite of amnesia; it suggests the flooding in of memories. Tsoules enters through the audience, as the narration begins: "I have always believed that the audience and the performer are indivisible — they’ve left the same street to walk in here." She takes her jacket, hat, and muffler to the imaginary cloakroom, "where we leave intimate parts of us, hanging there with people we do not know."

During a quiet moment, the dancer/character listens intently, bending down to put her ear to the floor; she looks at her hands and raises one overhead and brings it behind her. Then she poses in an off-kilter arabesque, as if she’s going to fall forward, and the narrator starts describing the system of weights and pulleys that keeps all of the curtains, side panels, backdrops, and scenery in a theater "flying" up and down.

The strong swing of Tsoules’s arms leads the flow of her body, whether she’s striding downstage or tumbling across the floor in half-somersaults. The next segment of "story" in this dance has to do with the "electromagnetic field" left behind by thespians or dancers who have died onstage and the feeling that "one day I will be thought of as a ghost." From large, looping runs around the stage, Tsoules shrinks her movement to that of a child measuring distances by placing one foot in front of the other, as she recalls the sound of her shoes in the alley outside the theater.

The strength of her choreography in this piece is the intertwining of several motifs, overlapping them just as memories and shards of knowledge and bits of conversation tend to do. Tsoules herself speaks the final part, remembering seeing Annie as a child, sitting on the edge of her seat, clapping after everyone else had stopped, and singing in the car on the way home, "I think I’m gonna like it here." And obviously she still feels that way about the theater.

The Living Room has similar theatrical aspects woven through its movement, but it’s set to Django Reinhardt’s gypsy swing, not to text. The scene is established with a couch, an easy chair, and an old-fashioned Victrola, complete with amplifying horn. The dancers take turns "changing the music" for each segment of the dance, and the sound design even recreates that raspy rub of a needle getting stuck in a groove.

The first scene has one dancer in the chair and the other eight posed in and around the couch, all of them smiling broadly as if for a family album snapshot. Tsoules explained that her inspiration was the Family Feud TV show which she watched as a child with her grandparents. She encouraged her dancers to think of themselves as a bunch of siblings gathered in this living room, and she asked them to think about what kinds of traditional — and non-traditional — things they would do there.

Thus, there’s a funny musical chairs-like struggle for places on the couch and a subsequent pout by those five who lose their spots: arms folded over chests, they stalk off. At another point, the dancers become bathing beauties, with mock breaststrokes, sidestrokes, and even on-the-floor backstrokes. And then there’s more jockeying for position for another snapshot, in which those in front are picked on by those in back. Once again, Tsoules focuses on arms — swinging, shoving, balancing torso and legs crab-like on the floor — to pull the dancers from one sequence to the next. It’s a fun and funny piece.

There are six more works in the PC program, five of them by the 26 dancers from the PC Dance Company. In addition to Tsoules’s work, they will perform Oliver’s TranscenDance, to music by Michael Torke; Bolger’s Beyond the Blue, set to Handel; Nicoli’s If the Ceiling’s Too Low, the Rose Can’t Grow, to music by Peter Jones; Trainor’s Serendipity, set to Handel; and Horrigan’s Breaths. Rounding out this varied show will be Michael Bolger and Eva Marie Pacheco performing FOlded Hands, WaRM HeArt, to opera arias by Verdi, Saint-Saëns, and Denza/Turco. All in all, an ambitious but captivating evening of dance!

The Blackfriars Dance Concert will be presented on Saturday, February 19 at 8 p.m. and on Sunday, February 20 at 2 p.m. at the Smith Center for the Arts at Providence College. Call (401) 865-2218.