The live performances in the Motion State Dance Festival include a trio, a duo and a solo piece by Doron Perk called “Grandfather Visit.” Before his grandfather died in 2021, Perk would visit him in Israel and spend hours or days listening to stories of his life.
“He was a Holocaust survivor,” Perk said. “Throughout my childhood, I grew up with this very dramatic, ominous story about the way he survived. So I was trying to create a piece that kind of reflects the feeling of receiving all of this information as a grandchild, receiving all of this legacy, all of this heavy heritage – and how is a child going to deal with that? So when he was gone, I felt really the need to kind of deal with it directly with my art, because that’s the best way I know how to deal with anything.”
“Grandfather Visit” opens with Perk dancing to a Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. His movements are fluid, graceful and emotional.
“A huge part of my relationship with my grandfather is, of course, the love, the emotion, the stories, the vibrant emotions coming up,” Perk said. “But then there’s also this other side, which is very, very strict and very kind of square thinking of, ‘What does it mean to be a good person? What does it mean to be a successful person?’ It’s measured.”
There are moments in the piece that have a rigidity to them, but then there are elements of Jewish folk dance and improvisation in a more contemporary dance style.
“How do you value things, and the idea of keeping the beauty of ballet or the fantasy of ballet without being rigid?” Perk said. “It’s also kind of a statement that parallels what my relationship with my grandfather is. And how do I, even though he’s gone, I definitely feel like I’m still having a relationship with him or with my memory of him, with what I experienced.”
I also talked with Bebe Miller, who will perform a piece called “Tether.” It’s a trio with Darrell Jones and Angie Hauser. The piece is set to “Dream” by John Cage – one of the composer’s more gentle works.
“And if you can imagine that in a trio there is, say, the ‘hero’ voice,” Miller said. “And then there are two whose job is like, how do I attend to that? How do I respond to what it is that they are doing? That is our basic triangle.”
“Tether” begins with the three dancers entering the stage, but there’s a toss up as to which dancer will start and how they will start. It can be different every time.
“We love the word tether,” Miller said. “It’s come up often because it’s a way of, if not literally being tied together with a rope, but it’s being tied together with an idea and a perspective. The human liveness is the gift, the interaction between them – not necessarily the theme of the work, but you get to see like, oh, my goodness, we are all in this moment together. And so that is our tether.”
Behind the piece is a long history of collaboration – Miller, Jones and Hauser have worked together for over 20 years.
“I have the privilege of watching them over time, watching us all get older in this field, watching all of us continue with how lives, political and social lives, unfold,” Miller said. “And how we find our own relevance with each other, as our own particular kind of family, has been a pleasure. So, to be at this level of investigation and experimentation and just play is pretty wonderful.”
The Motion State Dance Festival opens Thursday with dance works on film. You can see the live performances Friday and Saturday at the Wilbury Theatre Group’s space at the Waterfire Arts Center in Providence. Program and ticket information can be found at motionstatearts.org
