COURTESY OF EMILY BOEDECKER
Barn Dance
Hannah Dennison enlists Vermont dancers in honor of Pina Bausch B Y M EGAN JA M ES
“Dear Pina” audition at the Breeding Barn at Shelburne Farms
H
THIS IS THE PIECE I’VE BEEN WAITING TO DO MY ENTIRE CAREER.
I DON’T FEEL LIKE I NEED TO COMPROMISE.
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FEATURE 37
BARN DANCE
SEVEN DAYS
DANCE
elements that captivated her: one performer roughly brushing another’s hair; a woman standing “like a tree, screaming her head off ” and then falling to the ground, straight as a board. Are they faking this? Dennison remembers wondering. In “Dear Pina,” Dennison has incorporated some direct nods to Bausch’s harsh theatrics. At the audition, she gathers six dancers around her to participate in a vignette section. She asks the first dancer to hoist an unwieldy stool on her back and carry it that way down the length of the barn. “If it’s difficult and uncomfortable, that’s good,” she says. Dennison turns to the next dancer: “Would you like to fool around with suitcases?” She instructs the third to walk downstage with a ball of string, “and if you cry, that’s fine.” The string, Dennison explains, was used in her “Waterfront Project,” an art event that took place every Sunday of 1997. “This string has a lot of memory,” she says. “It’s been a long way.” She turns to the next dancer and asks, “How loud can you yell?” Finally, Dennison asks one of the few male dancers to undo a female dancer’s ponytail, sit her in a chair and brush her hair. “She may fall out of the chair,” suggests Dennison. The vignettes, all happening at once, create the emotionally tense and slightly hallucinogenic atmosphere for which Bausch was known.
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Emily Boedecker, a dancer and June — to get this thing together. “I’m deputy state director for the Nature asking a lot of these performers,” she Conservancy, is working with Dennison admits. to promote the piece. When Boedecker If Dennison can meet her roughly first walked into the Breeding Barn, she $140,000 fundraising goal, she’ll pay says, she imagined staging a medieval the dancers for their work. “I feel really joust there. strongly that artists should be paid for What Dennison has planned is the training and skills that they bring to similarly imposing. As the dancers their job, just like plumbers and archimove in unison across the dirt floor, tects and executives,” she says. their sneakered feet make great scrapDennison began to fall in love ing sounds, enhancing the minimalist with Bausch even before she saw her music composed company, by Dennison’s Tanztheater partner, David Wuppertal, Severance. The perform. In barn is enorthe early ’80s, mous — 418 by Dennison 107 feet — and pored over the the choreograGerman dance phy is athletic magazines feaenough to fill turing Bausch, H ANNAH D E NNIS O N, it. The dancers unable to read C H O R E O GR AP H E R run, kick and the text but twirl with outmesmerized by stretched arms, the photos. At exhaling audibly in simultaneous bursts. 36, Dennison took a creative pilgrimage One vigorous sequence stirs up some to Germany to see the work of choredowny white feathers, which float down ographers who inspired her: Bausch, from the rafters and scuttle across the Reinhild Hoffmann and Susanne Linke. floor. Bausch moved her the most. In the past, Dennison built Dennison traveled to Bausch’s her works around untrained home theater in Wuppertal to community performers. Not see “Seven Deadly Sins” — a this time. “This is the piece I’ve work full of what the New been waiting to do my entire career,” she York Times called “colorfully harsh mosays. “I don’t feel like I need to compro- ments.” “I was floored,” says Dennison. mise.” Plus, she has exactly 17 rehears- The dancing was powerful, she continals — one a week between February and ues, but it was the startling theatrical
SEVENDAYSVT.COM
annah Dennison has known for some time that when she returned to the Vermont dance scene, it would be to do something grand. The veteran choreographer, who created ambitious, often site-specific dance works in the Burlington area for about 20 years, dropped out a decade ago. And then, in 2009, Dennison learned that the German choreographer who was her idol, Pina Bausch, had died. Dennison recalls that she wept — and knew exactly what to do: She would rejoin the local dance community with a large-scale work in honor of Bausch, who was known for her viscerally intense dance-theater works. “This is my tribute to her,” says Dennison. “I’m giving back to her.” On a recent afternoon, nearly 40 Vermont dancers turn out to an audition for “Dear Pina” in the cathedral-like Breeding Barn at Shelburne Farms. Dennison doesn’t intend to turn many people away; she simply wants to run the dance in the barn and make sure the dancers are a good fit. The work will debut in June 2012, copresented by the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts and Montpelier’s Contemporary Dance and Fitness Studio (CDFS). For the choreography, Dennison has partnered with Amy LePage, who helped form the Montpelier Movement Collective, and Hanna Satterlee, director of professional programming at CDFS. “I could not do this piece without them,” Dennison says.