11/5/2023 0 Comments Festival body jewelsI need more freedom,” he said, adding that he hoped to keep working with a company in Zurich.Īnd he is also making plans for a future away from the dance world. “You get a lot from it, but after a while, for me, the cost is too high. He was philosophical about moving on from such a demanding schedule. We don’t know what’s going to happen to the repertoire,” Harrell said. “We will leave, but there are still some talks to go. When they leave in 2024, the Schauspielhaus Zurich Dance Ensemble will fold. Last winter, the city of Zurich declined to renew the contract of the duo of artistic directors that brought Harrell to Switzerland, Benjamin von Blomberg and Nicolas Stemann. Yet this new work, and the Festival d’Automne’s “Portrait,” come as Harrell faces unexpected change. What if there had been like a community of people to support her?,” said Harrell, who studied with the feminist thinker bell hooks at Yale. His next production, “Tambourines,” will be loosely inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel “The Scarlet Letter.” “I’ve been thinking about how to reclaim this idea of the fallen woman. It allowed him to work on a more ambitious scale, and with a full-time group of dancers: “It was a turning point where we began to share a movement style, a philosophy of movement,” he said. “I didn’t want to speak anymore,” he added.Īfter years as a freelance choreographer, in 2019, Harrell was invited to form a permanent dance company at the Schauspielhaus Zurich, one of the German-speaking world’s most high-profile theaters. A self-described “drama kid,” he considered a career in acting, but after being introduced to the Six Viewpoints, a movement-based theater practice in college, he said, “I came back to my body, and all of a sudden, I just wanted to move.” The academically gifted Harrell was pushed to be ambitious by his college-educated parents. My grandparents were always using metaphors, like: ‘There’s more than one way to skin a cat.’” “There was a certain kind of poetry to language, to eating, to being. He came of age in the ’50s, and managed to buy land,” Harrell said. “My grandfather was the patriarch of the town. Harrell’s imagination was shaped, he said, by his “very idyllic Southern upbringing” in Douglas, as part of a well-to-do Black family. “He just goes full-hearted onstage, and he brings everyone along.” Yet she was also drawn to his warmth, she added. “He has a minimalist approach that is so deep in references,” said Maria Ferreira Silva, a dancer at the Schauspielhaus Zurich. Since then, Harrell has refined a stripped-down approach to movement, featuring the signature tiptoeing, he derived from runway walks. In his sprawling breakout project, “ Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church,” initiated in 2009, he dreamed up a choreographic encounter between the early postmodern choreographers that worked at Judson Dance Theater, in the 1960s, and the Harlem vogueing ball scene. Instead, he observed them from the outside, and took from their “theoretical underpinnings,” he said, rather than copying what he saw. Unusually, this late starter - he turned to dance after graduating from Yale in the 1990s - has never taken formal classes in any of the techniques that have most influenced him, which include vogueing and Japanese Butoh. The Paris retrospective showcases his ability to deconstruct existing styles and mold them to his “imagination,” a word he frequently returned to in an interview. Harrell appears onstage in all of these productions.
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