Past Articles about Louise Gillette and Trapezius
City Paper, Philadelphia, PA - September 26–October 3, 1996 - Critical Mass:Dance
Trapezius Aerial Dance Company
Conwell Dance Theater, Temple University, Sept. 20-21, 1996
Remember when as a kid you sat on a swing, pumping your arms for all they could muster to get a motion going that felt like flying? That's the sort of exhilaration tapped into by Trapezius Aerial Dance Company.
As the name suggests, the troupe uses trapezes. It's directed and choreographed by Louise Gillette, an instructor in Temple University's dance department whose training includes studies in ballet, modern dance, jazz, tap, contact improvisation, African dance and low-flying trapeze. With Trapezius, Gillette mixes elements from several of those genres as well as gestures of her own making, to craft pieces that are both choreographically challenging and great fun to watch.
The program opens with Douglas Cornman, a company member, giving a brief explanation of Trapezius. Key components of what they do, he declares, are strength, timing and grace. I'll add daredevil spirit. That's because some of these maneuvers were right tricky, and there's but a bare floor under the trapezes.
The program opens with It Takes Three. Done to the tune of "Hernando's Hideaway," this features Gillette and Stephen Strecansky taking playful liberties with the tango, with Strecansky flipping Gillette over his shoulder and Gillette pushing him away with her foot planted on his chest. And then there's a fiery moment when the pair lie tangled in embrace while straddling a trapeze bar.
In Absolution Gillette performs a lyrical solo to liturgical-sounding music by Arvo Part. She symbolizes a woman racked with feelings of guilt and sorrow. At times Gillette drapes an arm and/or a leg through loops dangling from a trapeze. These ethereal poses are Absolution's most striking and provocative.
Me Jane plays off the notion of how a women can be both turned on and turned off by an uncivilized man. Jockey is a metaphoric acrobatic duet in which two people constantly vie for position in a relationship.
Gillette saves the most ambitious works for last. Day In, Day Out, done to Ravel's Bolero and featuring a large cast from Full Circle Theater, an intergenerational company of actors teenage through octogenarian, takes an inspired look at basic movements of everyday life. This one's more complex than it appears on the surface, since Gillette cleverly juxtaposes a repetitious circuslike cacophony of minor vignettes — to include people embracing, undressing and exercising — to highlight coincidental activity in space and time.
The finale, Romp, has 10 dancers running, doing club dance steps and making bold moves on four trapezes. As with Day in, Day Out , it plays up the funky coolness of mixed yet simultaneous motion, but Romp, with its criss-crossing action above and below, prompted members of the audience to exclaim "wow!" and "whoa!"
This eclectic slate makes for an enthralling program. Gillette's ability to explore and push the limits of human physicality while crafting new movements in the process — both surprising and compelling — is invigorating.
— Deni Kasrel
City Paper, Philadelphia, PA - September 25–October 2, 1997 - critic pick-dance
Trapezius
Dancer/choreographer Louise Gillette is artistic director of Trapezius Aerial Dance Company, so named because she likes to set pieces on low-flying trapezes. But the apparatus is absent from the company's current production, Fear of Flying. Gillette had to nix them after suffering a neck injury. Gillette hasn't abandoned an aerial approach to dance, however. She's got her cast of nine dancers doing maneuvers while strapped in harnesses.
That forced a rethinking of certain concepts. "With the trapeze you can get on and off and hang by your ankle or hand. With a harness you are always suspended at the middle of your body," she notes. Initially, Gillette thought this presented a limitation. Then available options expanded. "Someone can jump on the person who's in the harness and use them as a platform," she observes. "That opens up different kinds of possibilities."
Fear of Flying draws on the nature of obsession, fear of being alone and fear of intimacy. It's done in 15 short scenes; each covers a different emotional quality. Sections are alternately in the air and on the ground. At times the dancers break away from the proscenium, "to give the audience a more three-dimensional experience."
Creating dances provides this choreographer "a non-verbal way of coming to understand my experience." She says there's no neat beginning, middle or end to Fear of Flying, which concerns love, sex, conflict and separation. As she comments, "All these feelings are so complex you can't really break them down into a linear format."
Trapezius Aerial Dance Co./Fear of Flying, Fri. & Sat., Sept. 26 & 27, 8 p.m., Temple University's Conwell Dance Hall, Montgomery Ave. at Broad St., 204-1122.
- Deni Kasrel
City Paper, Philadelphia, PA - October 2–9, 1997 - Dance Reviews (please note, if you follow this link, that the photo posted with this article is NOT a photo of Trapazius Dance Company!)
Fear of Flying - Trapezius Aerial Dance Company, Conwell Theater, Sept. 26-27
Louise Gillette, artistic director of the Trapezius Aerial Dance Company, begins by questioning the most fundamental and inescapable constraint on all dance, indeed on all movement—the force of gravity. What, she asks, would dance be like if it took place not on or just above the ground but primarily in the air? One way of testing this potentially liberating premise would be for the dancers to work from trapezes, as they do in the circus; indeed, Gillette's earlier work (which I have not seen) did just that. In the present instance, however, her dancers do not fly; instead, under their outer clothing they wear thin mesh body suits to which a large buckle is attached at the waist, so that they can clip themselves at various heights to ropelike harnesses that hang from the ceiling. Once attached, and of course still subject to gravity, their range of movement is quite different from that of either trapeze artists or earthbound dancers. On the one side, because they are hanging and because they can swing, they do not have to support their weight. On the other, because they are attached at the waist, unlike aerialists they cannot dismount on their own or hang from the platform, but with the ropes hung close together, one dancer can cling to another and use the second dancer as a platform.
Last week's hour-long program at the Conwell consisted of 15 short numbers, performed without interruption, and played in the dark. It began on the ground, but after a while took to the ropes, and the scenes were broken up by several brief interludes in which the nine dancers climbed ladders between the two levels of the theater and generally ran up and down the aisles, usually at top speed.
According to Gillette's program notes, the scenes originated in exercises that began with a premise at once emotional (e.g., relentlessness, powerlessness, coercion) and technical. Gillette also says that from these exercises "emerged the possibility of creating movement scenes which would take place within a very small space, lending a sense of being trapped." A good example is provided by Fitful Sleep, in which two dancers' limbs are intertwined like those of sleepers tangled on a bed, except that because they are harnessed to the same point on the rope, they are unable to recoil far from one another, as they could if they were on a bed. On the other hand, because they are securely attached, the dancers can take astonishing positions that often led to humor as well as menace.
In any event, once the premise is laid down, the choreographer and company then develop the ideas that emerge as the concept is explored kinetically. The result is as strong emotionally as it is physically. The opening number, Ticking, took place on the ground; in it, two couples, each outlined in a square of light, moved mechanically to the ticking of a metronome, in the process generating mounting anxiety. Drowning was a nightmarish struggle that took place, also on the ground, in which one dancer attempted to free herself from the grasp of another. In Orbiting, two couples were in harness but at different heights, so they could swing toward one another but never meet, creating anticipation and frustration. Throughout, the audience was impressed by the extraordinary strength and versatility of the dancers and at the same time oppressed by the powerful overall effect of their work. The general feeling of the evening was that of obsession, of fear of intimacy, and of the fear of solitude, as the title Fear of Flying indicates.
Whether intentionally or otherwise, the combination of the harnesses and the much greater vertical element of the work served to distance the dancers from the audience, even in Conwell Theater, which is a relatively small, albeit high-ceilinged, space. We in the audience took in the patterns created by the dancers swinging on the ropes, and were struck by the unexpectedness of the movements they carried out, but often the faces of the dancers were in near or total darkness. (I hasten to add that this was certainly intentional; the lighting design, by Nanette Hudson-Joyce, was exceptionally good.)
Louise Gillette is doubly gifted: she possesses a remarkable choreographic talent and has gathered together a splendid company that is able to translate her imagination into movement. I look forward to seeing more of this remarkable lighter-than-air approach to dance.
- Robert Ackerman
City Paper, Philadelphia, PA - April 29–May 6, 1999 - Critic Pick
Helping Louise to Fly
Last year, when dancer/choreographer Louise Gillette learned that she was suffering from a brain tumor, her friends sought a way to raise money so she could do what she wanted to do most: reduce her workload as a physical trainer and marshal her diminishing energies into making dance for her aerial dance company, TRAPEZIUS. So they formed the Friends of Louise Gillette Committee, a remarkable coalition of cultural movers and shakers under the leadership of Jonathan and Judy Stein, and organized the benefit concert taking place Monday—a dance event which, even it weren't for such a good cause, would be a must for every dance fan in the city. The lineup is rich in talent and history: Janet Pilla and Sandy Chase, who were the first two dancers Gillette trained on the trapeze; Adam Battlestein, who hired Gillette as a trainer in his Pilates studio before moving away to join Pilobolus; choreographer Stephen Welsh, a close friend of Gillette's who came up with the benefit concert idea; and a stellar lineup of local talent including Headlong Dance Theater, Kent De Spain, Leslie Dworkin, Roko Kawai, Lionel Popkin, Patricia Graham, Leah Stein (teamed with jazz pianist Dave Burrell), Fusion II under the direction of Gwendolyn Bye, and PA Ballet wunderkind Matt Neenan (performing one of his own pieces with Anne White and Christine Cox). And Gillette's own TRAPEZIUS people will dance their goofy, gymnastic Backyard Circus—a piece whose irrepressible spirit is not only shared by Gillette herself, but, it seems, by her many, many friends.
-David Warner
Flying Together: A Louise Gillette Benefit Concert: Painted Bride Art Center, Mon., May 3,
1999 8 p.m.