AwA - Rainbows and Butterflies

by AwA

w o s b a n d n i B a R

Forty106 Dance Project is Steamboat’s first contemporary/modern dance company. The name comes from the basic geographic coordinates for Steamboat Springs while the concept came from wanting to push the boundaries of dance in our community.

Founder Meg Southcott was practically born dancing. At age three she was officially enrolled in dance classes. As she grew up, she entered more and more competitions and loved them. She has performed at Aloha Stadium, the largest stadium in the state of Hawaii as an opener for the National Football League’s Pro Bowl.

During college she transferred to SMU in Dallas, not by choice, Meg wants you to know, but the experience ended up being one of the most memorable, enlightening, tough lessons she has had.

Those lessons now guide her forward. “No experience in my world goes unused,” said Meg. “Living is being human.” Her time spent after college at Perry-Mansfield Performing Art Camp was perhaps the most transformative of her career. “No one will really understand the magic that is Perry-Mansfield unless they have experienced it for themselves. There are no words.”

Her dance muses are life experiences and the human condition.

“That may sound cliché, but movement and dance is about life, body, mind and soul and our physical reactions to those experiences,” said Meg. “Our lives and how we experience them are unique and different. Not one person has the same experience, however the emotions and physicality of the emotions we feel can be understood on a grander scale. Attachment of the physical 50

Winter 2022

expression of the emotion is where the texture and story come to life in my movement.”

Sources of inspiration include music that gives a gut reaction, or a few steps repeated over and over until the movement comes. Inspiration can come from a story or an image or sometimes inspiration comes from nothing at all. “I take the everyday human, break it down into physical dance movements and rebuild a snippet of life that is digestible for all audience members. Half the time it’s trial and error,” explains Meg. In any choreographer’s work, body, action, space, time and energy are the who, what, why, when and where storytelling elements of dance. The body is the physical being—the conduit between the inner realm of intentions and the ideas, emotions and our outer realm of expression and communication. Action is what the body is doing—stepping, Art with Altitude

Butterflies turning, twisting, slouching, sliding, peaking. Dance is the string of movements made up from action but also the pause and stillness which can be as powerful or more powerful than movement.

Space is the direction. Where does the dancer begin, which way do they move and why do they move that way? Time is about creating a unique beat within the rhythm, timing and tempo of a piece. Energy is movement flow and the use of force, tension and weight. Energy choice can reveal emotional states more than other elements. These are the skeletons for creating movement.

Meg’s goal for her choreography is to take experiences and create a scene that can be absorbed by a wide audience. “I try to reach at least one person who resonates with the work as far as an emotion or memory. My stories can be literal and in-your-face or they can be simply a way for people to experience dance and see what comes up for them.” The way the body molds or shapes to a feeling is what the audience will understand to either celebrate life or go through the waves of an emotional event on something that could be seen as tragic—the anger, the frustration, the pity—we all feel these things. “We all embrace and have experienced the physicality of the emotion and then I just put some fancy steps to it—to make it look pretty or make it look ugly.

Ugly is just as good as pretty in the dance world because life is not always rainbows and butterflies.”

One of the main reasons Meg started Forty106 Dance Project beyond giving expression to her visions, was to give adult movers the opportunity that maybe they didn’t think they had when they Art with Altitude

Photos coutesy of Markella Kyprios

were little or as a vessel for adults who want to grow and experience these things. Some people have been told “you have two left feet,” or “you have no rhythm.” “My classes are all about ‘come one, come all, come as you are, we’ll have a blast.’ I am just a guiding force—I am not there to break you down I am there to build you up and take you on a journey that you want to go on and I will guide you through that. If you have never danced before and that’s something you want to try, let’s go. If you are healing from trauma you experienced in dance, I’m here for that too,” says Meg. “Dance has been used as a sign of respect, at weddings and gatherings, sacred dances and to pray for crops. There are dancers in churches and dances throughout history. All of these involve communities inside larger communities representing a vast span of diverse cultural movement that transcends villages, towns, cities, bodies of water and our interpersonal differences. Dance creates a common ground that allows us to show up as we are and to have a unique shared experience.”

ELEVATE THE ARTS: Visit forty106danceproject.com to sign up for adult dance classes or to find out where Forty106 Dance Project is performing next. AwA Winter 2022

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