New Dialect’s E mma Morrison a nd Tony Montalvo performingwith Intersectionat The Porch
intersection A NEW MUSICAL CHAPTER by Joseph E. Morgan | Photography by Eden Frangipane n Thursday, March 27, o ver three hundred people gathered in the Platform, an industrial warehouse, to experience the remarkable premiere production of Intersection, Nashville’s newest music ensemble. The concert, titled Transfiguration and led by director Kelly Corcoran, featured five works by contemporary composers and an interdisciplinary collaboration with both the
O
Zeitgeist gallery and New Dialect, Nashville’s new, contemporary dance ensemble. The event was intimate, severe, and intellectual with a pronounced sense of urban chic—a world apart from the backbeat-driven kitsch of lower Broadway. The interdisciplinar y aspect of the concert sought an expression of how the transfiguration theme intersects in these art forms. The dances, both choreographed by Banning Bouldin, director of New Dialect,
74 | May 2015 NashvilleArts.com
lent a moving physical manifestation to the score but maintained an ambiguity that allowed for personal interpretation. For example, in Murmuration, the choreography for S ofia Gubaidulina’s tense and contrapuntal Concordanza (1971), Bouldin sought a contrast between a starling-inspired sharp and delicate individual movement and the fluidity of group migration. However, seeing the human forms enact these instinctual, animal movements gave the choreography a primal, ritualistic feature.