Viva variety!

Groundwerx Dance Theatre struts its stuff

by Johnette Rodriguez

Joan Brazier and Heather Ahern

When the founding members of Groundwerx Dance Theatre went their separate ways a few years ago, Heather Ahern stayed on at their studio in the AS220 complex, teaching classes and hosting an ongoing series of informal choreography showings. Even she has been amazed at the variety of dancers and dance groups who have come through those Empire Street doors over the past 18 months. Wanting to share some of what she's seen as well as new work of her own and of friends, Ahern has assembled an impressive "Choreography Showcase" for this weekend (May 3 through 5) at the Carriage House Theatre.

"At Groundwerx, we had wanted to offer a safe place to try stuff out," Ahern elaborated. "We got performance art; we got text and movement; we got authentic movement that's not even meant to be performed. We got all kinds of people experimenting with the performance mode."

From that wide-ranging variety of work, Ahern has chosen modern dance pieces by Kathy Gordon Smith, Cathy Nicoli, Melody Ruffin Ward and herself with Joan Brazier; neoclassical Indian dance by Tara Ahmed and Wendy Jehlen Nayak; the Arabian Village Dance Troupe, led by Sabra Jamal; and hip-hop/salsa dancer Jorge Campos. Panamanian Campos, a newcomer to Rhode Island, has done a lot of commercial work for television and for companies in Panama, and he now dances at local clubs with Derek and Doug Perry in Dance Planet.

The Arabian Village Dance Troupe, a group of nine Providence residents, has performed Middle Eastern dances in many venues around southeastern New England. Though not strictly belly-dancers, they include a lot of hip-undulation in their movement, according to Ahern, who finds their sparkling costumes, tinkling music and passing out flowers to the audience, integral parts of their winning presentation.

The dances of Tara Ahmed and Wendy Jehlen Nayak originate in a different corner of the world. Both trained in classical Indian dance as well as other movement styles, Ahmed and Nayak have combined modern dance, T'ai Chi, Indian dance and Indian poetry into nine short vignettes, based on the basic emotions in Indian drama. "They are enlarging the movement vocabulary of Indian dance," noted Ahern, "and the music they use is more eclectic."

Melody Ruffin Ward, who came to Rhode Island College last fall as an assistant professor in the Department of Music, Theatre and Dance, has studied both Cunningham and Limon Techniques. She will perform a solo from a piece called Parables, to spoken text and the music of Sweet Honey In the Rock. When I saw this piece at Rhode Island CCollege in March, I was struck by the gut-level truth about women's lives that Ruffin Ward poured into her dance. Bare feet planted in wide, deep plies, arms swooping together toward the sun or the moon, Ruffin Ward, in a plain white cotton shift, seemed to represent that proto-female connection to the earth, both its stolidness and its seasonal temporality.

Both Kathy Gordon Smith, who has danced with Groundwerx, and Cathy Nicoli, who was a Groundwerx member, have chosen classical music to accompany their modern pieces: Nicoli's uses Bach; Gordon Smith's Vivaldi. Smith was inspired by a story about Vivaldi's teaching music to orphanage girls, who became quite accomplished musicians but were not allowed to show their faces in public. It's unclear whether that was because they were orphans or female or both but it sparked Gordon Smith to weave the ideas of being hidden hidden and not realizing your full potential into her dance.

Heather Ahern, in a duet with Joan Brazier, has returned to a theme she's explored in other dances, the emotional lives of women and society's expectations of them -- "We're playing around with the girl/woman thing that I just can't let go of yet," she admits. This is Ahern's third piece to use dolls as props, though this time they are plain, non-gendered, non-featured muslin dolls, not contortionist Barbies. She and Brazier will wear clunky black boots with wedgie heels, black leggings, short pleated skirts and hot pink shells, looking "severe and playful at the same time," in her words.

"One of the things that inspired this," Ahern explained, "was the idea that we are born with all the emotional material we're ever going to have -- we just find different ways of expressing it: joy, love, anger, whatever. But these things mean different things at different points in our lives. Sometimes we put so much stock in something, and later it doesn't mean the same thing at all."

But for Ahern and the group of performers she has gathered for "A Choreography Showcase," dance still means everything -- at least for those few moments when music drives movement, feelings drive movement, and the movement drives art across the footlights to us.

The Choreography Showcase will be at the Carriage House Theatre, 7 Duncan Avenue, Providence, May 3 through 5 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $15 ($10 students and seniors). Call 831-9479.