BodyVox is back with the latest iteration of its "Serious Cupcakes" series (Jan. 26-28, Feb. 2-4 at BodyVox Dance Center, 1201 N.W. 17th Ave.)
The show consists of seven different dance pieces, each around 10 minutes, from seven choreographers, using the BodyVox company dancers.
They are considered bite-size piece of dance, like cupcakes of motion, and fit the BodyVox signature of mixing sensuousness with athleticism, humor and recognizable tunes.
Pamplin Media talked to two of the dance makers, New York-based Darvejon Jones (pronounced Darv-VAY-on) and Portland-based Laure Redmond. Jones has created “Apricity,” which is an old word meaning warmth of the sun in winter. Redmond is a life coach and teaches a stretching class in the BodyVox school, and “Lycra Dreams,” which is about 1980s exercise class culture, is her first choreographed piece.
'Apricity' Jones
“We all like that sensation, of the sun in winter, so (my piece) is about enjoying the pleasant things when it might be harsh around us. It's in the genre of jazz dance, which is very dear to my heart culturally,” Jones said while watching rehearsal last week.
“Working on 'Serious Cupcakes' has been very interesting and easy because BodyVox is inherently collaborative and interdisciplinary. I’ve felt really supported throughout the process,” Jones said. He started the work by listening to jazz artists such as trumpeter Christian Scott and dancing around his kitchen. Jones creates his dances from a feeling. “I take a lot of inspiration from how (Scott) puts his music together, the instruments he chooses to highlight, and the complex rhythm underneath the melody.”
Jones is working on his MFA in dance at Hunter College in Manhattan. He flew to Portland, met the dancers and they hashed it out with him, two hours a day, in just eight days. The whole ensemble is in “Apricity” and it’s the finale of the night.
The cupcakes don’t have to match thematically, although Jones did notice a lot of jazz in the accompanying music. His show, he says, “Is a mixture of rooted African American vernacular jazz. There's some moments of theatrical jazz, there's modern jazz, it's just like a gumbo of jazz.”
He says founders Ashley Roland and Jamey Hampton give him the freedom to create the dance but offer idea based on their experience. “They have a knowledge base, they'll say ‘What if we do this?’ And then I'll look at it, and sometimes I might reject it and a lot of times, I'm like, ‘Oh, I like that. Let's do it that way.’ It's about us working together.”
Having said that, he doesn’t feel he owns “Apricity.” Other dancers can take it.
“I think it's we own it together. If another company did ‘Apricity’ it would be different, just because we have different bodies. I always tell people once I’ve finished a dance, ‘This is yours now. This is you.' Giving generously and liberally has opened a well of creativity for me personally.” Jones makes notes, but if he were to recreate the piece he would work from a video. “I say I don’t want you to be identical, I want you to be individuals. I want you to really show your love for dance and show who you are.”
Shrink to fit
In the 1980s Laure Redmond used to teach a movement class in New York City at Body Designed by Gilda, a dance studio at 70th Street and Columbus Avenue (Gilda herself ran the other branch in Los Angeles.)
Redmond now teaches Stretch Appeal, a combination of isometrics, cardiovascular workout, stretching and meditation, at BodyVox.
The concept for “Lycra Dreams” came to her while in surgical recovery last July. She would wake from dreams of her 1980s classes, exhausted, as if she had been in a workout.
“The dreams of these dancers in lycra helped heal my body. I just kept going there mentally,” Redmond told Pamplin Media at rehearsal last week. So she pitched “Lycra Dreams” to BodyVox top brass and was accepted. She started rehearsals in early December.
It’s partly a nostalgic romp through the age of day glo workout wear and high energy kick routines. The show starts with the class watching vintage video of original TV fitness guru Jack LaLanne, in his black lycra onesie, showing how to row the boat sitting down. Then the piece bursts to life, the group sometimes facing the audience, sometimes facing the rear mirror.
“What was powerful in the ’80s in the fitness movement was everyone was welcome. If you weren't in a company like Alvin Ailey, or Martha Graham, you could go to a fitness studio and feel like a dancer, because we're all dancers, it's just do we exercise that part of ourselves? And that's what I do here on Tuesdays.”
“The mega fitness movement all began with Jack LaLanne telling people to get healthy, to get up off their butts, to stand up, to sit down, to get up again and do lunges while you're doing it.”
Redmond said the studio fitness craze, as seen in “Flashdance” and “Perfect” (with Jamie Lee Curtis and John Travolta) was building community. “On the dance floor or in the fitness studio, little romances and little flirty things were always happening. You're giving a little look to someone who you're doing a knee lift next to.” She put that into her dance.
“People would go off from the class to get a coffee together, or to go out to dinner or to go to breakfast. A lot of what we see today in dating apps, it actually all began on the fitness floors of these gyms and studios in New York. That was where you met people.”
She showed them Jack LaLanne and clips from “Perfect” and the movements emerged. “I could feel a little energy with Ariel and Alicia, who are the first vignette, and I said, ‘That's my first twosome.’ And then I wanted the two women to have a flirtation, and they actually caught my eye because they were on the side during this moment in the rehearsal, very early on, having a ball together, bumping. So then I honed in on the specifics of those two vignettes, do this, do this, and then we perfected it further.”
She also showed them a Melissa Etheridge video, where they're all in a bar and little twosomes break off in the dance. “I used that as an example. And then I fine tuned it. But first I have to feel it.”
She loved their energy.
“That endurance was so real. That's why in the piece they go ‘Whoa’ and then big high kicks coming back out.”
The coffee shop across Columbia, The Sensuous Bean, is still there, but Body Designed by Gilda is long gone, its ideas gobbled up by the big gyms like Crunch and Equinox. “That closed us all down. There was a 10-year period where we were intimate in these studios.”
How is it being a first-time choreographer?
“I've taught every week of my life for as long as I can remember so to actually choreograph dancers has been the most extraordinary experience. I have felt so creatively inspired and empowered by it. Like when I paint, and the canvas is blank, and then I start to see something happening. It has been very moving, literally to watch it take shape every week.”