Art in the Open Philadelphia : Leah Stein Dance Company

Leah Stein Dance Company

Philadelphia, PA

Art in the Open Performances at Schuylkill Banks - Saturday, June 11, 6 pm and 7:30 pm

For over 15 years I have been exploring the inter-relationships between people and the physical surroundings through movement, sound and site. I am interested to re-create the frame through which dance is experienced and I thrive on the challenges and of this process. The boundary between the performers and the audience is less strict, the space is vast; often, there is no ceiling, and there is an immediacy to sharing the common location - performers and audience alike. At the center of my choreographic process is the orchestration of sound, movement and physicality of the surroundings to discover a deeper experience of inter-connectedness. How can an empty urban lot be 'played' choreographically and musically? How do the immediate surroundings reflect who we are, how we see, and how can the performance created in a specific location awaken new perceptions? These are the questions I ask myself. I see my job as one to create a sense of place through a connecting stream of sound and movement - melodic, cacophonous, metaphoric, and abstract. I jump into the wild process of working on site with a great curiosity and sense of discovery. I search, with the dancers and collaborators to find unexpected moments of resonance, juxtapositions, connections and inter-relationships. This is true in my work for the stage as well. My dances are tactile in nature. Sound is always an equal player and the musician is often structured into the piece as performer.

In terms of particular sites, I am drawn to industrial decay and the intersection between nature, architecture and history that are evident in the ever-changing urban landscape. When I began found the site for BARDO (2005), I was fulfilling a long-time dream to create a dance in an empty urban lot framed by the walls of adjacent buildings. The audience sat in the center of the lot on round stools and slowly rotated as the performance progressed around them counter-clockwise. The piece began in the light and ended in the dark, after the sun had set. This 'in-between' time of dusk changing to evening is a favorite time of day. I have always enjoyed contrast. I created "Falling From the Sky" (2000) at Longwood Gardens, an enormous botanical garden, with fields, water, fountains, winding paths, wooded areas and distant vistas covering an expansive territory. Immediately after this project, I began work in a very small corner parking lot with very high exposed urban walls rich with disintegrating textures of old bricks and painted lines, cement and a few greens weeds emerging from the barren dust. The great contrast of these sites fueled my process. It enabled me to explore contrasting ideas.

Recently, I created a large-scale work at Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site in Philadelphia. The audience moved through the 11-acre site, breaking up into 4 groups following 4 different simultaneous dances, and finally meeting up at the end. The nature of this site, the historic significance, the difficult questions about human suffering and the rawness of the place offered even more momentum to move toward my next site work in a 200-year-old traditional Japanese house in a small town, south of Tokyo, on the Izu Peninsula. There, with the project collaborators, I found an intimacy and personal connection that inspired me to consider questions of scale in landscape and contrast of environments.

In my work I often ask, "what would happen if...." For example, "what would happen if dancers and musicians performed in a prison in response to the environment, or in a traditional Japanese house, or in a reflecting pool" etc. The answer to these questions propels me into a deeply personal and collaborative space about aesthetics, crossing boundaries, personal stories and finding meaning in the small and unexpected. I have worked in a variety of spaces and learned from each one something different about myself and about dance making and sharing. My approach reflects the Buddhist concept: Esho Funi meaning that the self and one's environment are essentially one.

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