Ravish in L.A.

Brontëites around L.A., you have an alert from the New LATC:

The New LATC
Theater 3
November 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th
Thursday, Friday, Saturday - 8:00PM
Sunday: 3:00 PM

Rosanna Gamson / World Wide

ravish

Created and Directed by Rosanna Gamson

Dancers include Michael Gomez, Sarah Goodrich, Marissa Labog, Lilia Lopez and Carin Noland; Dr. Flavia Sparacino provided the interactive visual effects; and Rob Bailis conceived the score.

Inspired by the creative hothouse in which the Brontë sisters wrote intensily romantic fictions (Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, etc.) without the benefit of any real-life experience. Ravish presents - through cutting-edge interactive media - the rapture of passionate friendships and shared imagination.

Los Angeles Times provides more information:

[W]ith her latest work, "Ravish," premiering this week at the New LATC, Gamson has embarked on what might be her most ambitious effort at page-to-stage transformation. Based on the lives of the Brontë sisters, the hourlong multimedia piece blends movement, text, video and an interactive floor linked to computer software that generates images by tracking the motions of the dancers. If all goes according to her plan, "Ravish" should "engage the audience in the way you are engaged when reading a book," Gamson says. "With some dances, you can just watch them and let the movement wash over you. In this case, there's the added complication of technology, text and image. The audience is going to have to do some decoding."
In other words, do not expect a story ballet, the dance equivalent of a biopic or the kind of movement piece that might feature extensive monologues adapted directly from "Jane Eyre" or "Wuthering Heights." Rather, if a recent rehearsal was any indication, Gamson has chosen a more abstract and allusive approach to the Brontës, their prodigious literary output and their tragic deaths. (All of them died from tuberculosis before the age of 40.)
In one section, Gamson's cast of four women and one man mutter barely audible, often unintelligible sentence fragments as they perform rigorous movements that alternate between frenzied and labored, ecstatic and foreboding. Often, they dance apart from one another, spinning in circles and looking like children who lose themselves in games involving imaginary worlds. Sometimes, they wrestle and play variations on Follow the Leader. Frequently, they crash to the floor and at certain moments scream in horror.
To this, add video projections of young girls at bedtime, poetic texts written by Gamson and the interactive floor designed by Flavia Sparacino, which creates the effect of letters forming words that appear to follow the dancers as they move across the stage.
"I wanted to capture this moment in adolescence before you become socially inhibited but when romantic love is in the picture -- the time when girls feel like they can do anything, when they form these intimate, passionate friendships and play elaborate games," says Gamson. "The Brontës and their stories happened to fit what I wanted to communicate." (...)
With "Ravish," Gamson doesn't think she's going to fail. "But this is a hard piece for me to put up," she acknowledges. "It's as if I'm dancing in my living room and I've invited people to watch. In many ways, this piece is really about me and my childhood."
At her Echo Park home, Gamson alternates between pure conversation with a visitor at her dining room table and using her home office computer to show off some of the text and imagery that will be part of "Ravish." She's a tall, lanky and highly articulate woman who frequently cracks jokes and claims to always be "changing my hair." (This day, it's short and two-toned, white on top and black on the bottom.) She can be disarmingly self-deprecating yet at the same time projects seriousness and confidence about her art.
"I would love it if people just saw my work as theater," she says of her long-standing zest for creating multimedia performances. "I wish we could all just get past putting each other into boxes, and I don't really like the term 'multidisciplinary' -- something about it sounds evil. So if you're going to use a catchall phrase to describe me, then I guess it's 'choreographer.' " (...)
Gamson's ideas for "Ravish" also came from watching her own daughters, now 10 and 12.
"They would play all these elaborate games, the dressing up, the setting of rules. . . . It was all so super-theatrical," she says. "It got me thinking about the Brontës, about femininity and creativity and how, to me, there's nothing silly or weak about that passionate, emotional feminine voice of the Romantic period. I think it's a heroic voice."
In addition to reading the six [sic] books by Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, Gamson read several biographies, did a bit of Internet surfing and familiarized herself with such subjects as Victorian mourning rituals. She also gave her performers assignments to help them develop "hybrid Brontë characters" and a sense of intimacy with one another. "I made them wrestle a lot," she says. "I wanted my dancers to communicate not so much the Brontës' words but more their isolation from the world, their physical condition and their ability to communicate."
Marissa Labog, one of Gamson's dancers, had the task of researching Charlotte Brontë and says she loved the "homework" Gamson gave the troupe. "She really got us to understand who we are within the work and where the movement is coming from," she says. "Rosanna's always coming from a very intellectual place, where it's never movement just for movement's sake."
Sparacino, who heads a Santa Monica-based interactive technology and digital art firm called Sensing Places, similarly observes that Gamson was unlike the many people who ask her to "just do something cool" for them. "Rosanna had a well-defined vision," she says. "She was very clear that she didn't want the technology to dominate the dancing, and she knew what she wanted to express."
Gamson concedes that the various elements of her production, viewed separately, do have an "Oh, cool" factor. "I guess part of me comes from the 'God forbid you should bore the audience' school of choreography," she says. "But I also just love big theater. The little, sensitive productions that people do in lofts never moved me."
Ultimately, Gamson wants things her way but wants the audience to like them too.
Above all, she hopes she has effectively communicated "an imaginative world, where the people in it never move into growing up. That period right before I was 13, that's when I felt most myself. And I still have this vivid imaginative life. That's why I made this piece. I don't want to be alone with it. I want everyone to come visit me." (Susan Josephs)

Well, not really six books ... not counting the Poems, the Brontë sisters opus contains seven novels, but only six were published when they were alive.

EDIT: Los Angeles Times publishes a correction here.

Categories: Dance