Anne Collod, Moving alter-natives

About the Performance

Where is the line between cultural appropriation and celebration? How has the blurriness between these two concepts affected the legacy of American modern dance? In Moving alter-natives, Bessie Award–winning choreographer Anne Collod takes a look at the foundations of modern dance, including the gender roles and colonialist perspectives that inspired two our most well-known dance icons.

At the heart of Moving alter-natives is the faithful reprise of solo and group pieces by choreographers Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, founders of the Denishawn Dance Company and integral to the development of modern dance in the US. With a culturally and artistically diverse cast of six international performers including Sherwood Chen, Ghyslaine Gau, Nitsan Margaliot, Calixto Neto, Pol Pi, and Damini Gairola, Moving alter-natives scrutinizes these historic dances in restagings that explore their aesthetic impacts and political stakes. In doing so, the performers confront St. Denis and Shawn’s use of South Asian, East Asian, and Native American cultural appropriation that was prevalent during the colonial eras of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Re-creations in this work include three solo pieces by Ruth St. Denis including Incense (1906), Kashmiri Nautch (1919), and Lazy Nautch (1917), and excerpts of group pieces by Ted Shawn including Kinetic Molpai (1935) and The Dome (1910), with different interpretations led by the six performers.

Run time: 1 hour

Support

Special thanks to Villa Albertine – Chicago for their support of this presentation.

About the Artists

Anne Collod is a French contemporary dancer and choreographer. She danced for various choreographers and started her own work focused on the topics of reinterpretation of major dance works from the past, and on the utopias of the collective. In her projects, she links performance, research, and teaching. She received a Bessie Award in 2009 for parades & changes, replays, the reinterpretation of Anna Halprin’s major work Parades & Changes (1965). She is the recipient of the French Villa Medicis Hors les Murs program for her artistic research on the Dances of the Dead, which led her to create The Parliament of the Invisibles in 2014, a dance piece haunted by the German danse macabre from the 1930s. She teaches in various contexts and is certified in Feldenkrais technique.
 

Like Isadora Duncan, Loïe Fuller, and Mary Wigman, Ruth St. Denis (1879–1968) is considered one of the matriarchs of modern dance. Moving seamlessly between popular entertainment and theatrical dance, Eastern and Western influences, and the spiritual and sensual, St. Denis not only made great strides in elevating American dance to an art form, but also presented women as complex and autonomous. Similarly, Ted Shawn (1891–1972), St. Denis’s husband and partner, was one of the first American male dance artists to earn national recognition and champion dance as a valid form of expression for men. Together, they created Denishawn, an ambitious performing company that toured extensively throughout the US and abroad from 1915 to 1931, as well as a school with an impressive roster of students, including Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman. In addition, Shawn founded Jacob’s Pillow, which has become a critical venue for dance in North America.

Funding

Lead support for the 2024-25 season of MCA Performance and Public Programs is provided by Elizabeth A. Liebman.

Generous support is provided by Ginger Farley and Bob Shapiro, Martha Struthers Farley and Donald C. Farley, Jr. Family Foundation, N.A., Trustee; Anne L. Kaplan; and Carol Prins and John Hart/The Jessica Fund.

The MCA is a proud member of the Museums in the Park and receives major support from the Chicago Park District.