“Aureate” at the DeLUXE Theater

The Pilot Dance Project’s upcoming evening-length premiere entitled Aureate is a series of dances that seeks to re-examine traditional feminine iconography through the lens of the natural world. The word aureate means “of golden color or brilliance.” The gold in this new evening of contemporary dance and music harkens to a poetic use of the word: gold as in the essence that makes us human and relatable. The concept leans towards the mystical, evoking the metaphor of illumination as a link to what we perceive as the sacred. Aureate comes together as a mining of our assumptions to reveal the gold beneath the surface by the evening’s collaborative team of choreographers, Adam Castañeda and Ashley Horn, and composer Sonia Flores.

On a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s Old Masters galleries, Pilot Dance Project Artistic Director Adam Castañeda shows me the painting The Crow Exposed by Melchior d’Hondecoeter. It is an unusual painting for its time: the canvas is packed with a cacophony of movement by many birds, each of a different species and some that would not normally exist in the same region. A stunning peacock dominates the canvas. These are not delicate birds conjuring a bucolic calm, rather they are animated, perhaps even outraged. Castañeda explains that both the painting and the story it depicts, culled from the Greek mythological tale of the duplicitous crow (The Bird In Borrowed Feathers), inspired the mise en scène and movement ideas for one of his dances for Aureate.

I am attending the Pilot Dance Project’s rehearsal where Castañeda is working on his dance that explores the effusiveness and mystery of birds acting as the creatures they are in nature, rather than our idealized impression of them. Dancers Kristina Prats and Jade Devault are performing a choreographic sequence that Castañeda has created. The women lunge out into the space, reversing themselves as they turn in opposite directions. They are strong and buoyant, each in their own reverie as their arms carve out generous circles. Castañeda then begins to create insertions in the movement sequence that break the pattern and bring the dancers closer to each other. They wind around each other and then finally face each other in confrontation before returning to their respective movement patterns. These direct interactions between the dancers now become a key element in the choreography, adding an emotional dynamic as well as creating renewed excitement as they seamlessly disengage and launch back into the original choreography. 

As the great choreographer Mark Morris describes it: one can have all these lovely patterns, but when one dancer simply takes the hand of another, it means something. Emotion is triggered. In this section of movement I am watching in rehearsal, this is what Castañeda is doing, creating the power of the relationship between the performers. 

Dancers Dorianne Castillo, Stormie Holmes, Sierra Johnson, Ashley Boykin, Prudence Sun, and Castañeda join the cast and the duet is inserted into the middle of a larger ensemble section. As the dance is performed from the beginning, the eight-dancer cluster commences by reaching outward and up, arms and legs extending like tendrils. The dancers fold over into a contraction and release, and suddenly their proximity breaks open and they glide into new patterns and configurations. Castañeda’s ability to create these interwoven designs of dancers that change and regroup in this free-flowing way is extremely gratifying to watch; the intricacy of the juxtaposition of bodies always feels organic, like a flower that achieves its pleasing symmetry without artifice. 

In another dance entitled Golden Tendons, Horn has created a delicate duet for Sarah Leung and Cloe Leppard. The two women fill the air that surrounds them with gestures that curl and spiral, traveling through the space with their bodies gracefully arcing as if drawing the paths of sinuous vines across the stage. They finally come to a rest with a gentle upward tilt, perhaps seeking a moment of respite or contemplation before leaping forward and beginning again. Horn explains that the title Golden Tendons “derives from the idea that the covering — aesthetic, protective — has been stripped away from these women and they are just these golden tendons and muscles moving with one another, unburdened but also completely vulnerable.” Indeed, the choreography flows with an easy grace and open tranquility. 

In discussing her new work, Horn also describes a concept that developed from visits to museums. Her work Strange Flowers, a quartet for dancers Leung, Leppard, Castañeda, and Carlos Tice-Zelaya, is inspired in part by an exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum of pioneering women who were scientists, civil rights activists, and cultural icons. After the museum, Horn visited the Smithsonian Botanical Gardens: “I was inspired by the strange flowers in the garden and how they related to these women who faced not only the challenges of breaking ground in their various fields, but also the societal notion that they were unusual for focusing on work that was considered traditionally men’s work, for pushing boundaries outside of the accepted role of women, and the toll it took on their possible interpersonal relationships.” 

The music for Aureate is composed by Sonia Flores, who will be performing the score live with her band Aurum Son, which features Flores on upright bass and vocals and  Jesse Ward on guitar. Mentored by Damon Choice, who played with the renowned Sun Ra Arkestra, Flores feels that playing music is a way of digging deeper into our humanity. For her collaborations with Castañeda and Horn, she likes to see videos of the choreography and create music that responds to the movements of the dancers. (The sections of Aureate that I watched in rehearsal were performed in silence while the composing of the score was in progress). Flores explains that she is very inspired musically by the way that dancers move. Her score for Aureate includes both through-composed and improvised sections. Interestingly, gold is an element that also resonates deeply with Flores: “Gold is this pliable metal that is said to have come into being by an explosion of stars.” Her band’s name references this idea: aurum is a word for gold and “son” is a reference to the sun, as in the star. Like her co-collaborators, she often looks to nature as inspiration. Before Adam approached her with his ideas for Aureate, she had been imagining how a bass with its dark timbre would express the sound of birds. 

In my interactions with all three artists to learn about their creative processes for Aureate, I took away how eloquently they expressed the thematic synergy they feel when collaborating with each other. Their collective vision is unified and at the same time filled with the precious mystery that makes contemporary dance and music so appealing. 

 

The Pilot Dance Project presents Aureate on June 22 and 23 at the DeLUXE Theater (3303 Lyons Avenue) in Houston. Find tickets here.