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Hunter and Ward bare their souls at RIC
BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ
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The Rhode Island College Dance Company will present two local dancer/choreographers, Paula Hunter and Melody Ruffin Ward, in a program titled "Legible Bodies, Hearts, and Minds." Providence-based Hunter has created and performed her solo work, an unusual blend of storytelling, memoir, and dance, for the past 20 years in venues around the country. Ruffin Ward, an associate professor of dance at RIC, makes dances that seek to explore the past (her African-American heritage) and heal the present (the ongoing invisibility of many African-American artists, especially dancers). Hunter is reprising (and revising) a 2001 solo previously called The Unexpected and now given its full title: Nothing Is More Unexpected Than an Erect Penis. Hunter took this piece to a choreographic workshop in New York City last year to hone and polish it. "It’s so nice to have peers knock it down into bits," Hunter reflected, in a recent conversation at her East Side rehearsal space. "I don’t usually like anything literal or mimed, but I’ve been opened up to the possibilities of more literal images." Indeed, Hunter’s movements and words plunge us into the morning routine of a frazzled waitress trying to get to work on time. Jammed in with other passengers during the morning commute, she looks where they are looking: at the growing erection of a man seated in front of them. By the time she bolts out the door and runs the three blocks to the restaurant, where she hears the dishwasher ask her, as he does every day, "What train you take?," she’s ready to tell him, "The train with erections." That deadpan, dead-on description is vintage Hunter, as is the contrast between tense moments being described (the dishwasher breaks a glass and blood is dripping down one arm) and the long, lingering phrases of her arms, hands, legs, and feet. "I want to make my movement like arias from an opera," Hunter noted. "They have to be the same every time, so that the story around them turns into a folk-tale." The theme of Unexpected reaches its climax (so to speak) in Mrs. Vensky’s second-grade classroom, where questions spin out faster than the whirling dervish of Hunter’s character: Why has the teacher hauled out one of their classmates for a spanking? How does Hunter/the young girl have the gumption to steal the teacher’s breath mints and toss them to the class from her stance atop the teacher’s desk? Is the shock of classmate Jimmy’s penis pointing out of his pants greater or less than the shock of the screaming child being spanked? Another long-titled piece of Hunter’s — I used to perform these scary, demented solos during which I’d dance on rigid legs — is actually a triptych, with each part incorporating stiff-legged steps. The first, Extinct, deals with declining bio-diversity, as Hunter glides robotically and rips Beanie Babies off her long coat. The second is a section from 2004’s Chopin and Me, titled Tutu with Glasses and Shoes. And the third, Savior, is a wacky layering of Eminem’s music with Martha Stewart (Hunter in oven mitts). She will also perform 9/12, first presented at NYC’s Dixon Place as part of Afterimages, performance pieces about the aftershocks of the terrorist attacks. And the Rhode island College Dance Company will present Hunter’s reaction to the Asian tsunami, A Day Abroad. Melody Ruffin Ward’s half of the dance evening, Stop, Pause, and Breathe, is in five parts, with Ward performing in two duets and one solo, titled One goes there alone. Set to Meredith Monk’s singing, it begins with Ward hunched to one side, mouth to folded hands, as if whispering into them, and then stretching one hand high, fingers furled, thumb akimbo. Other strong images include: her hands twisting tightly at her throat, her head thrown back (the violence of being rendered voiceless); a squat-legged crawl with hands touching the floor (the animal in us all); and looking up at a now-open hand and bringing it slowly to meet the other (an unquenchable need to communicate). These five short pieces continue a theme in Ward’s work — "my personal journey of racism and identity and memory. "I felt like I wasn’t finished with that conversation," she observed, sitting in RIC’s dance studio during a rehearsal break. "I needed to ‘stop, pause, and breathe,’ but still think about bringing up my own daughter and still remember what’s brought me to this point." As young girls in Macon, Georgia, in the late ’60s, Ward and her sister had to get approval from the board of a local dance studio (parents of students) to take lessons with the white girls. That incident became a part of the dialogue Ward had with her students in creating last year’s Unremember, and she wanted to go back to some of the movement vocabulary that had provoked. Ward dances the third section, Lean on me, go to the edge, with Kathy Gordon Smith from Roger Williams University. Also set to Monk, it has poignant moments of supportive relationships — Smith jumps onto Ward’s back and is let gently down to the floor — and vivid moments of individual remembering: arms rounding to pull memories in; striding on tiptoe among them; hands to eyes at the thoughts that come; arms circling around chests in self-comfort. It’s an evocative evening of dance, in which Hunter makes you sit up and take notice and Ward makes you sit still and take stock. "Legible Bodies,Hearts, and Minds" will be performed Thursday and Friday, March 31 and April 1 at 8 p.m. at the Forman Theatre in the Nazarian Center at Rhode Island College, 600 Mount Pleasant Avenue, Providence. Call (401) 456-8144.
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