Professional dancers who master safe, graceful aerial movement are about as common as chefs who pirouette while they cook.
Like the dancing chef, specialists in flying choreography are few and far between. Theirs is a small, close community.
That’s one reason Cirque du Soleil recently enlisted Boulder’s Frequent Flyers Productions – a company consisting of artists who take flight while performing both traditional and unconventional steps – to mount an outdoor, vertical dance on the side of a building at Cirque’s Montreal headquarters during a 2,000-person gala.
It’s also the reason that in the seven years since Frequent Flyers launched its Aerial Dance Festival the event has grown to include artists from around the globe. They spend two weeks in Boulder teaching and performing with bungees, trapeze, harnesses and the like. But even those apparatus will seem mundane during this weekend’s aerial dance showcase, a nine-part concert staged by Frequent Flyers and its festival faculty that includes four world premieres.
Take Kim Epifano and Richard Kittle of San Francisco’s Epiphany Productions. For the showcase, this duo will incorporate a dangling lawn chair into a piece about tension in love and relationships.
“They manipulate each other up and down the rope,” said Frequent Flyers artistic director Nancy Smith. “It’s really fun and funny and clever.”
Trapeze twins Elsie and Serenity Smith also conceived a piece for the showcase. Sassy and set to swing-era music, the dance reveals the skills the twins gleaned from time performing with Cirque du Soleil.
“They have all these circus chops,” said Smith, whose own company will mount the concert’s only ensemble work.
This is the first summer Robert Davidson has participated in the festival. Davidson is head of movement at the National Theatre Conservatory in Denver. He spent his early career specializing in modern dance before becoming enthralled with the idea that dancers can manipulate air and space using aerial tools.
“Lots of aerialists just want to stay in the air,” Davidson said this week about the evolution of his choreographic style. “I’m interested in blurring the boundary between being on the floor and in the air. That’s a magical few inches.”
Davidson has a theory: Audiences are drawn to aerial dance for more than flying acrobatics. He wonders if the movement might also trigger subconscious, prenatal memories. “There’s just something about the swaying, hovering and cradling that’s incredibly comforting,” he said.
“Black Purple,” the choreographer’s showcase work, is more somber than other selections. The dance is set to “Kyrie” and “Gloria,” two movements from the “Mass for Double Choir,” composed by Terry Schlenker of Denver’s St. Martin’s Chamber Choir. It attempts to narrate one person’s spiritual experience of seeking mercy and then finding glory.
“It goes from low to high to low, from ragged to serene, and from hopeless to hopeful,” Davidson said.
Frequent Flyers Aerial Dance Festival runs through Aug. 12.
Staff writer Elana Ashanti Jefferson can be reached at 303-820-1957 or ejefferson@denverpost.com.
Aerial Dance Festival 2005 Showcase
Internationally recognized aerial dancers and choreographers gather in Boulder for workshops and performances that culminate in this eclectic concert organized by Frequent Flyers Productions.|Dairy Center for the Arts, 2590 Walnut St., Boulder|8 p.m. Friday; 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.|$21-$31|303-245-8272, frequentflyers.org.
