Dancer and choreographer Banning Bouldin brings her contemporary dance collective New Dialect to OZ Nashville

August 21, 2014

John Pitcher

A decade ago, anyone in Nashville who wanted to study contemporary dance had just one option: leave town. The city, for all its progress in the other arts, remained a modern dance Mojave, an arid landscape that provided few opportunities to young dancers who wanted to follow in the footsteps of Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown and Alvin Ailey.

One young artist who became part of Nashville's dance diaspora was Banning Bouldin, whose contemporary dance collective New Dialect performs Thursday evening at OZ Nashville. As a child growing up in Music City, Bouldin was able to study classical dance at Nashville Ballet. But she had to move to New York and later to Europe to pursue her passion in contemporary dance.

"I left Nashville at age 17 and didn't return for more than 10 years," says Bouldin, who studied dance at The Juilliard School in New York City before launching into a successful contemporary dance career that included stints with Hubbard Street 2 and Aszure Barton & Artists. "I finally came back to Nashville in 2010 and realized that things were different. There seemed to be a real interest in contemporary art."

Indeed, much had changed in Nashville while Banning was away. Homegrown institutions such as the Alias Chamber Ensemble and Zeitgeist Gallery had been cultivating a taste for contemporary music and art among the city's arts aficionados. Even the Nashville Ballet had been flirting with artistic adventure, introducing such innovative contemporary dance series as Attitude and Emergence.

Bouldin, who started teaching contemporary dance at Nashville Ballet and Vanderbilt University after returning to the city, decided the time was right for Nashville to have its own contemporary dance company. So in January 2013 she formed New Dialect to provide training and performance opportunities to Nashville artists interested in contemporary techniques.

At Juilliard, Bouldin worked with Benjamin Harkarvy, who approached dance as an international language with many dialects. Bouldin found Harkarvy's methods to be revelatory. "People often misconstrue contemporary dance as being just one style," says Bouldin. "Contemporary dance actually has hundreds of different movement styles, so you can't easily pigeonhole it."

Like Harkarvy, Bouldin considers dance to be a kind of language, hence the name of her company, New Dialect. She likewise views it as a polyglot art form, hence the title of her OZ Nashville program, MultiLingual.

In true international form, the evening-length program will feature dance, film, visual art displays and original music created and performed by artists from Tennessee, Romania, Israel and Russia. The program will open with "Fight/Flight," Bouldin's collaboration with visual artist Emily Clayton.

Bouldin first conceived of the work after seeing a Clayton exhibit called Coupling at Zeitgeist last year. The show consisted of photographs of Clayton interacting with her own paintings and with pieces of textile. The photos often showed Clayton tangled in the fabric, her face obscured, her body struggling to break free. Clayton's energy seemed to jump right out of the photograph, prompting the online arts journal Burnaway to describe her work as "mesmerizing."

In a recent email, Clayton noted, "When making the work, I was thinking a lot about relationships, both physical and psychological." Bouldin got that meaning immediately. "The photos looked like modern dance to me," says Bouldin. "It got me thinking about different kinds of supportive relationships in dance."

The resulting work, "Fight/Flight," is an ambitious piece lasting 25 minutes and consisting of five movements. Samples of the work on YouTube show the nine company dancers exploring a gamut of emotions, with the artists seemingly engaged in mock combat at one moment while embracing each other with affection the next. The various movements are set to the recorded music of Goran Bregovic, Marguerite Duras, Alva Noto & Ryiuichi Sakamoto, the Books and Erik Satie. Photos from Clayton's Coupling will be on display at OZ on Thursday, along with ink drawings by Angela Markeen Naglieri that were inspired by Bouldin's "Fight/Flight."

Thursday's program will also include a short film documenting the creative processes of Israeli choreographer Idan Sharabi. The film, called "Phase 1," is a study in contrasts, a juxtaposition of slow, gentle movements and explosive bursts of speed.

The performance will end with a duet created by Bouldin and Romanian dancer Ana-Maria Lucaciu and featuring the live original music of Russian violinist and composer Lev "Ljova" Zhurbin. The Juilliard-trained Zhurbin writes music that seamlessly mixes classical music with klezmer. The choreography is a study in how different body types — the muscular, compact Bouldin and lanky Lucaciu — interact. "This dance is like a broken conversation that comes together," says Bouldin.

The performance is part of OZ Nashville's Thursday Night Things (TNT) series. Lauren Snelling, OZ's artistic director, says the series encourages local artists to experiment. "OZ is like a blank canvas, which allows artists to try new things they might not attempt anywhere else," says Snelling.

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