Quarry Dance I The Dušan Týnek Dance Company Halibut Point State Park, 2012 Sallee Slagle photo |
Quarry Dance VIII, 2019 |
Alexandra Berger, lower left |
"On a stage performance there's that striving for
perfection, because it's so stark and pristine and structured. Here it's not
that way at all. There's a survival aspect to it. There are so many factors we
can't count on, like where the sun's going to be in our eyes on any given day,
or how breezy it's going to be, or how loud the seagulls, so we can hear each
other....
....But there's a cohesiveness. It's good for us as a company. It brings us together in a way that a regular performance couldn't."
Nicole Restani, left |
Dancer Ned Sturgis recognizes that "Dušan's work in general requires quite a bit of trust. It's very athletic and borderline acrobatic. When we get here, it heightens that even more so. We're dangling off cliffs, or dangling each other off cliffs....
....Dušan has us do a lot of partnering, so we are used to doing unusual things with each other. It's not totally a shock when we come here and he says, 'Can you go upside down in a tree, and flip over?' We're not surprised when he asks those things of us. We have to figure out how to do them."
Says Park Superintendent Mark Peterson, "They did an excellent job. The part of the dance around the tree expressed the lily blooming at this time of year, I thought. Seeing the yellow running down the trails, glimpses of it between the green reflecting the half way point in the summer where things are starting to dry out--I thought the program was very cool."
"I hope that the audience is not aware of the
difficulty of putting on a performance like this. You want them to appreciate
the work that goes into it, but you don't want them feeling sorry for everyone.
They just want the joy. They want the end result. The dancers can complain and
all that, but during the performance you shouldn't have a sense of that."--Dušan
Týnek
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