Top Flight Island Moving Co. takes it outside BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

Island Moving Co. has always been brave about staging summer dance concerts al fresco, but in 2002 and 2004, they went one step further by performing new works designed specifically around an outdoor location, such as the lawn behind Doris Duke’s estate at Rough Point, the ravine at Ballard Park, and the dark passages within the ramparts at Fort Adams. The latter site inspired New York-based choreographer Noemie La France to create Invisible Sins of Fort Adams, which will be reprised during IMC’s Flight of Steps series July 15 through 17 and 20 through 24.

Seen last September at the company’s Open for Dancing event, Invisible Sins was memorable for many reasons. Audience members in small groups were led by two flashlight-carrying guides down unlit passages to peer into "listening tunnels," underground rooms where vanity and jealousy were portrayed; or a rifle gallery where a single male dancer enacted anger. Humorous tableaux of gluttony, involving grapes gorped quite noisily, and sloth, with lolling bodies draped across an arched window and slumping down behind it, were set off by scenes of snarling greed and mysterious now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t dancers representing lust.

Also re-staged for Flight of Steps is a trio by IMC artistic director and choreographer Miki Ohlsen titled Ruthless, in which a daughter struggles to leave her mother and start a new life with her lover. Portions of Ohlsen’s tango series, Hora Cera, set to music by Astor Piazzolla, will also reappear.

Ohlsen will premiere a new work, Rooms of the Heart, set to the sounds of the music collective Rachel’s, which takes an interesting look at how we see ourselves in relationship to our families. She uses nine dancers, with three female dancers portraying one woman.

"For me, the dance is about a woman on a journey, looking back at the people she’s been in her life," Ohlsen said. "The three parts are not necessarily the young, the middle, and the old person. It’s not that. It’s a person trying to incorporate all of the persons that they are and make those a whole."

Ohlsen explained that she began by thinking about family photographs: "Everybody gets in the photo but there’s one person constantly reflecting. Sometimes she’s part of the family, but it’s also that feeling of having always been on the outside."

The first weekend at Fort Adams, California-based guest artists Colin Connor and Debra Noble of Connor/Noble Dance Company, who presented their energetic and elegant duets in at the 2004 summer concert, will perform No, Resistance Is but Vain and Close to Shore. The first takes its title from a 16th-century drinking song by Henry Purcell.

"It’s a mad duet about the irresistibility of desire," Connor noted in a phone conversation from Pasadena. "It definitely has a baroque feel to it, and it’s hysterical. Everyone’s so afraid of the lyrics of songs nowadays — all of these would have had advisory warnings."

In one part of the dance, they are almost miming the lyrics and when the song turns into a round, the movement gets quite frenetic. "That one’s really fun, the way we get pulled into situations that we can’t resist for the life of us."

A new piece, performed publicly for only the second time in Newport, is Close to Shore, with a score made up of natural sounds such as wind, rain, and fire, interspersed with music by Henryk Gorecki.

"I was thinking of my father’s intense connection to the physical landscape in which he was raised and how that’s not the case anymore," Connor reflected. "Everyone’s living in similar subdivisions, near a mall. There’s a question of what provides some deeply felt sense of place.

"My premise here is that we find that in the people we love," he stressed. "Somehow the fragrance of somebody’s skin and the sound of their voice is now what becomes the same as a forest or a coastline or a mountain range. Effectively, the loved one becomes that shore. We know so much information [and] our senses carry so much more, but we don’t necessarily acknowledge that any longer."

Seeing dance performed outdoors and getting a below-the-scenes tour of Fort Adams will certainly stir up the audience’s senses beyond just seeing and hearing: the breezes on your skin, the smells of wildflowers, the taste of salt air on your tongue.

The Connor/Noble Dance Company, plus Ruthless, will be seen on the Fort Adams stage July 15 through 17 at 6:30 pm. Tours of Invisible Sins will take place July 16 and 17 at 3, 4, and 5 pm. Ruthless and excerpts from Hora Cera and Michael Bolger’s folded hands, warm heart will be seen at Fort Adams July 20 through 24 at 6:30 pm | 401.847.4470