When Bruce Wood was lured back to the North Texas dance scene in 2011, the Fort Worth native wasted no time realizing his long-held dream to make an all-male work. Backed in the 1990s, he’d considered starting a men’s troupe and over the years compiled a box of ideas that eventually inspired I’m My Brother’s Keeper.
Bruce Wood Dance Dallas, the late choreographer’s legacy company, is reviving it as part of a program that includes new pieces by dance-makers he influenced and who influenced him.
Wood’s first group disbanded a decade after he moved it from Austin to Fort Worth in 1997. A few years later, Dallas arts patron Gayle Halperin talked him into returning for at least one show. They dubbed it the Bruce Wood Dance Project to reflect its potentially temporary nature.
But the 2011 performances were so well-received, the project continued, and Brother’s Keeper was at the top of his agenda. A 25-minute version debuted the following summer, then more than doubled in length for a 2013 premiere.
“The second he had the chance: boom! It was something he thought he’d lost the opportunity to do,” artistic director Joy Bollinger says of Wood’s examination of the difficulties of male familial relationships across three generations.
He’d grown up the gay son of a football coach. At 16, he left home for George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, choosing the stage over the gridiron.
“He gave me a sheet of questions. Where did you learn to be a man? Who was your role model?” says Larry Lane, at the time a 50-something yoga teacher retired from a career as a New York theater actor and dancer.
Halperin recruited Lane to play one of the father figures. He wondered whether he could do it. It turned out he and Wood had similar backgrounds. Lane’s father had been a pro football player and Army general.
“We started talking about our relationships with our fathers. They were similar types,” he recalls. “We just explored and built the roles from the ground up.”
“Bruce would just drill them and drill them and drill them and drill them,” Bollinger says of the initial rehearsals with his young company members. “He was the sergeant, the one putting pressure on them to succeed, taking them to that place of being emboldened by what could be resentment, getting them to the boiling point emotionally.”
Tom Fowler, a massage therapist and former Joffrey Ballet dancer, played the other patriarch opposite Lane. This time, the roles will be performed by Christopher Dolder, chairman of the dance department at Southern Methodist University and Keith Saunders, an associate professor of dance at Texas Christian University. Musical theater performer Gary Floyd returns to sing “Nature Boy” to open and close the shorter version.
Company member Seth York wasn’t aware of Brother’s Keeper until it was scheduled to be performed at the Joyce Theater in New York in 2020. Now he’s reprising his role as one of the sons.
“As a dancer and performer, it’s lot to dive into,” he says. “You can treat it as more than just steps. A lot of the movement feels natural. At its core, it’s a lot of, ‘Just touch them, grab their hand.’ There aren’t a lot of flourishes.”
The piece begins with the full cast silhouetted on a bench, evoking a locker room but wearing suits. Some of the most memorable moments in the series of vignettes are poignant duets between fathers and sons depicting struggle, reconciliation and the passing of the torch. They frame Brother’s Keeper, which is set to the swirling minimalism of Philip Glass.
“Even the dancers in their 20s still feel like they want something from their dad that their dad can’t give them,” Wood said in a 2013 interview. “There’s still this chasm, and that’s the thing that I find the most interesting. If the dance is about anything emotionally, it’s about how to bridge that gulf, and what it’s like when you do. What that looks like, what that feels like and how difficult it can be.”
In the ensemble sections, the younger men battle one another, depicting frustration and aggravation, “that need to be presenting a masculine, strong front at all times, the movement being rigid and forced and dynamic and strong, then collapsing under that,” Bollinger explains.
At the end, “there’s a coming together,” she says. “Not that every one of those relationships has resolved. They all place their heads into one shape. It’s an acknowledgement that they’ve all experienced it. They’ve all felt it. No matter what your exact relationship with your father was like, you know that feeling from somewhere in your life.”
“To me,” Lane says, “it’s coming to a place of forgiveness.”
The program, called Echoes, also includes two premieres. The all-female Love Songs is a collaboration between former Bruce Wood dancers Jennifer Mabus and Kimi Nikaidoh and Dallas Black Dance Theatre’s Nycole Ray.
Mabus was part of the Bruce Wood Dance Project from its launch and was the rehearsal assistant for Brother’s Keeper. Nikaidoh worked with Wood in both of his companies and served as artistic director after his death in 2014. In 2010, he made an iconic solo for Ray called The Edge of My Life So Far. She was assisting rehearsals when Wood passed died.
Bollinger commissioned Love Songs knowing how they had been affected by him and having watched them develop as choreographers as she did. “All these people had come in clutch for him at pivotal moments,” she says, “when he was stepping back into the studio, trying to create again, struggling with his health, ending up losing his life.”
The other debut is Make Love Not War, a duet by Ben Stevenson, artistic director laureate of Texas Ballet Theater. The bill opens with Dvořák Serenade, a piece by Lar Lubovitch, a Wood mentor.
Details
June 6-8 at Moody Performance Hall, 2520 Flora St. $27-$69. brucewooddance.org.
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