SOUND & SMOKE
MARCH 29-30, 2024
GIBNEY’S AGNES VARIS PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, NEW YORK CITY
Selah Dance Collective presents the New York premiere of Meredith Ventura’s Sound and Smoke. This evening-length contemporary dance work explores the intersections of early modern dance and cabaret. This performance is a part of POP: Performance Opportunity Project, a Gibney program supporting the dance community through subsidized theater rental and performance support.
After a sold-out premiere in Southern California in January, dance artist Meredith Ventura will bring her Santa Barbara-based contemporary dance company to Gibney’s Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center. Ventura, who has been working between New York and southern California for the past decade, has crafted a thrilling evening, with pieces that blend styles and invite audiences to reflect on their relationship to their genealogies of dance.
As an ensemble, evening-length work, Ventura calls Sound and Smoke a “dance of death,” which contains the same revolutionary spirit through its references to the danse macabre. The work considers the staging of women’s deaths in theatrical representation in conversation with the history of modern dance, pushing against the current historiography and proposing that the fringe artists of Berlin cabaret have more to do with American modern dance than previously known. Sound and Smoke references historical, literary, and avant-garde figures and blends popular culture and high art, much like the cabaret and modern dance artists that Ventura references throughout the concert. Each dancer in the cast represents a woman whose life, work, and death speak to contemporary ideas about women's bodies.
The show opens with Mechanical Cabaret, a work by NY-based dance artist and Ventura’s longtime collaborator Chloé Roberts and is followed by the premiere of Meredith Ventura’s newest work, Bitter/Sweet with guest artists Emma Matthews and Tanner Blee. Another piece by Chloé Roberts, set to music by The 1975, rounds out the opening to Sound and Smoke, Ventura’s hour-long venture into the early 1920s, where cabaret artists experimented with different forms in smoke-filled Berlin bars and where Ventura argues the earliest roots of modern dance truly began.
FROM THE Choreographer
Sound and Smoke is the physical manifestation of my historical research into early modern dance performance and cabaret. I sought to reframe the representation of women’s bodies in art and literature through a lens that shifted the focus from the author to the subject of the works referenced throughout the show. Through dance, I provide alternative accounts of individuals’ lives and stories sidelined to construct a more cohesive sense of modernity-in-progress that defined the twentieth century. This tidy story left out those who did not fit in. This work contributes to a growing oeuvre of revisionary accounts of history that build upon the contributions of dance historians who have painstakingly returned to the archives to bring women like Valeska Gert and Anita Berber back from the dead.
For this piece, I cast each dancer as a specific figure from history, literature, or art. Then, I developed a series of choreographic encounters (21 sections within the five traditional “acts” associated with tragedy [and comedy!]) that place these characters in conversation with one another, out of time. I use their final words (most often before a dramatic onstage death) to call attention to how their portrayals in art, literature, and historical accounts reify cultural ideas and bodies that then crystallize into concepts, aesthetics, and politics.
This process provides an opportunity to create a kinesthetic relationship to history, forging an intertextual connection between seemingly disparate manifestations of similar ideas. My goal with this piece is to show how choreographic practice intersects with and develops from archival and theoretical research. This work required a highly collaborative and dynamic rehearsal process, and detailed documents on the myriad visual, sonic, and choreographic references throughout the piece were provided for the dancers. The dancers’ feedback has been integral to the final product you will see onstage this evening.
At its core, Sound and Smoke is a profoundly interdisciplinary work inspired by early modern dance performances on the cabaret stages of the fledgling and later failure of a democracy called the Weimar Republic. In this radical social and economic change period, cabaret artists created new forms of dance and theater, including hybrid forms that incorporated other modernist art. These works represent a generational response to the effects of industrialization and the sense of alienation in a rapidly globalizing world. Sound and Smoke speaks directly to our contemporary moment and the kinds of dis-ease that many feel in our complex social and political world.
Works like Sound and Smoke have the potential to reframe the past to navigate the present and dream for the future. My work represents a different understanding of historical narrative and embodies a radical theory of the body that requires self-reflection, accountability, and hope. I am deeply proud of this production and these dancers. I hope that you enjoy the show.
– Meredith Ventura