When Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet bounds into the Touhill Performing Arts Center for its first performances in St. Louis on January 28 and 29, it will bring a legacy from Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, a name from Columbia, Missouri, and dancers from all over the world.
Since 2005, Cedar Lake has been directed by Benoit Swan Pouffer, a seven-year veteran of Alvin Ailey who might be described as an African-Parisian, though he now lives in New York, where the company is based.
Cedar Lake may be based in New York, but it owes its name to a street in a central Missouri college town. Wal-Mart heir Nancy Walton Laurie founded the dance company in 2003, naming it after the street in Columbia where she had started a dance school.
Their dances and dancers, however, derive from anywhere and everywhere. A little like our David Robertson, musical director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Pouffer seeks out innovative choreographers around the world to create dance pieces for Cedar Lake.
“They are all different,” Pouffer said of the dances, “and the dancers are all eclectic. I’m looking for diversity, personality and skill.”
In the St. Louis performances, presented by Dance St. Louis with support from Centene Corporation, Cedar will perform three pieces by three composers from three different countries: Excerpts from Decadance 2007 by Ohad Naharin of Israel, Ten Duets on a Theme of Rescue by Crystal Pite of Canada, and frame of view by Didy Veldman of the Netherlands.
Ohad Naharin has said Decadance is “about reconstruction: I like to take pieces or sections of existing works and rework it, reorganize it and create the possibility to look at it from a new angle. It teaches me about exaggeration and under statement, it teaches me to laugh at myself, about the importance of perspective and lightness as a virtue, it teaches me about the love of dance.”
A snippet of a previous Cedar Lake performance of the piece on YouTube shows a large group ensemble, doing extremely athletic, joyous, stylishly connected moves to a smooth jazz tune.
Ten Duets on a Theme of Rescue by Crystal Pite is obviously a piece for a much smaller group of dancers – two at a time. The theme of rescue suggest emotional intensity, and that is certainly provided by the two brooding duets from the piece posted by Cedar Lake on YouTube.
“I am fascinated by the shared narratives that live in our bodies – the familiar, repetitive storylines that move across cultures and generations, and the body’s role in providing the illustrative shape of those moments,” Pite writes of the piece. “I’m curious about the way in which the body can convey profound meaning through the simplest of gestures, and how distortion, iteration and analysis of familiar human action provide an opportunity to recognize and re-frame ourselves in each other.”
Framing is the explicit subject of frame of view by Didy Veldman. WNYC produced a fascinating video report on Cedar Lake working up this piece. The fragments of the dance shown in rehearsal are conceptual studies of the relationships between men and women, using doors as images – frames – for barriers and passages. One of the episodes is a slow-motion fight – both hilarious and horrific – that must be terrifically difficult to dance.
“Cedar Lake will stir you with the power, energy and diversity of new contemporary dance,” said Michael Uthoff, artistic and executive director of Dance St. Louis.
Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet performs at the Touhill Performing Arts Center at 8 p.m. on Friday, January 28, and 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. on Saturday, January 29.
Tickets range from $30 to $50 for Friday and Saturday evening. All seats are $30 for the Saturday matinee. Tickets are available at the Dance St. Louis box office at 3547 Olive St. in the Centene Center for Arts and Education, by calling 314-534-6622, and via dancestlouis.org.
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