Stockbridge — Chesterwood dancer-in-residence Ian Spencer Bell performs once again at Chesterwood on Thursday and Friday, June 19 and 20, this year bringing his work indoors to the studio of Daniel Chester French, for “a very up close and personal performance.” The intimate nature of the space resonates with the new directions his work has taken, embracing improvisation and the present moment. But as in previous years, he will dance Isadora Duncan, who performed in the gardens for the sculptor French and his wife in 1898.
Furthermore, the “11 Pieces,” as the program is titled, are a nod to French’s very studio, which Bell knew contained a victrola. Obtaining a list of the records French had owned, Bell was “delighted” to see Franz Schubert’s “Six moments musicaux” among them. He had been working on an encore that Duncan danced to one of these. The Greig, Chopin, and Schubert on this program were all on the list. Instead of a victrola, Bell’s longtime collaborator, classical pianist Lauren Aloia, will fill the studio with live music.
Bell decided to loop the Duncan encore in conversation with choreography from the “Giselle” mad scene, from the 1841 French ballet. “Isadora had such friction with ballet,” he said, “and I liked the idea of putting these two things together.” In “Lovers Loop,” Bell explained, “the vocabularies are different, but it’s a nice project to pull the differences out. And they’re so gestural and sculptural, that also felt right for the space.” He feels that “all of Isadora’s works were like love letters, and she was always thinking about language and was a big reader.” Bell, also a poet, happened to have his own poem on “Giselle,” and so “Lovers Loop” will begin with a reading and improvisation to that poem.
Next he will reprise “Six Chelsea Love Poems,” but in a completely different form from last year, when he recited the original poems while dancing. He wanted to create an ensemble version and add music, which he did this past year for students in the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, then kept working on that unspoken version as a solo, both set to Edvard Grieg’s “Lyric Pieces.” In “thinking about the kinds of ballets that related to the text,” his gestures also allude to Balanchine ballets, “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” for instance, but Bell thinks his phrases more rooted in the “modern and postmodern aesthetic.”
“I love when artists make several versions of things,” Bell declares, “because we remain so interested in things and how they can change and what they can reveal. It’s hard for me to feel like something’s ever done; I can probably always go back and revise it. I also take great pleasure in revision.”
The two Duncan pieces at the heart of the program began with the fountain in front of the studio. “That fountain has been on my mind for some time,” said Bell. “It is technically the spot where Isadora danced, and so I was thinking of making a work for the fountain, and it occurred to me that Isadora has this Narcissus solo. It’s the solo that is said to have changed classical ballet.” Choreographers watching her 1904 performance in Russia considered “how ballet can become a more expressive—maybe a softer—gestural language.” Bell learned the dance, which Duncan set to Chopin’s Waltz No. 7, from Duncan expert Catherine Gallant.
Duncan meant her “Narcissus,” which Bell connected to the reflectiveness of Chesterwood’s fountain, to represent land and water. Bell recalled she also choreographed Chopin’s Waltz No. 6, known as the Minute Waltz, to embody fire and air. She conceived of them as a pair, so Bell will perform them together, though dancers today mostly do not. “One feels super narrative, and one does not at all,” he noted. Pianist Aloia will also bookend these dances with the 5th and 8th Chopin waltzes, enhancing continuity.
Bell will close with an original work, “Two Impromptus,” which he has been working on since traveling to Japan last August for a residency with Sankai Juku, a butoh troupe. He was first compelled by the form the previous year in a Jacob’s Pillow workshop. “In my early 20s, I was really interested in speed,” Bell added. “I’m a teacher, and so much of the practice is about slowing down, and that feels really important to teach children to learn to slow down and to observe and be quiet.”
“It’s also hyper-disciplined, and as a classical ballet dancer that appeals to me.” In Japan, in a gymnasium up in the mountains, they danced six or eight hours a day, slept on mats on the floor, cooked together, and even did some fasting, described Bell. “We created this, I suspect, very mesmerizing work. That’s something Sankai Juku does; they make these worlds on stage that you feel very easily and quickly drawn into.” He points out that Duncan was a world traveler and that it is exciting to bring this very Eastern way of dancing into the program. “It does not feel Western at all.” Still, Bell chose two Schubert impromptus for the music, based on the often very Western musical choices he has observed among butoh dancers.
In the butoh-inspired dances, Bells says he is thinking of images in a new way. And while he has “goals and objectives in mind,” the dances are structured improvisation, something he has long practiced and often incorporated, but not to this extent. “It’s very intimidating for almost every dance artist I know,” he says, but it is at the core of butoh, a “sense of being in the very present and responding to your body in this very moment and what it’s communicating to you.”
“I know which direction and which level I will be moving and falling in,” he explains, “but the steps are not always the same. I leave room for myself … to keep them alive.”
Tickets are available on Chesterwood’s website.
