After Bruce Wood died in 2014, his Dallas dance company began commissioning new work from outside choreographers, identifying mostly up-and-coming names before they were in too much demand.
Now Robert Battle, the former artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, has become the first big-time choreographer snagged by the company for a premiere. His playful, romantic jazz piece, wryly named Bad Dog No Biscuits after one of the songs he chose for the score, debuts when Bruce Wood Dance Dallas opens its 16th season this month.
It’s a wonder it took so long, considering Battle’s connections to North Texas. Former company dancer Jennifer Mabus was a founding member of his troupe Battleworks, along with two other graduates of the Southern Methodist University dance program. Mabus assisted him in setting Bad Dog No Biscuits on the Bruce Wood dancers.
Battle had seen the company perform at a festival in Oklahoma when he was invited to teach a master class at its Design District studio earlier this year. He was in town to create a new work for SMU.
“After the class, Gayle and Joy ganged up on me right here at this table,” he says with a chuckle in a recent interview at the studio, referring to Gayle Halperin and Joy Bollinger, the company’s executive and artistic directors. “I thought, ‘Well, I don't have time, maybe in a year or so.’ But they’re very persuasive — not that I didn't want to do it — then it all came together. And I’m so glad it did. They’re such an inspiration. The dancers are really top notch.”
Battle was on the plane to Dallas before he started figuring out what kind of work he would make for the Wood group. Thumbing through music, he came across jazz trumpeter-composer Sean Jones. Noticing that the new piece would be on the bill with a work by Wood mentor Lar Lubovitch set to classical music, he thought jazz would make a nice contrast.
“We need a spirit lift,” Battle says. “Something with a little fun is radical in these times.”
Seen at a run-through near the end of his time with the Wood company, Bad Dog No Biscuits opens with the syntactically challenged “Sean’s Jones Comes Down,” featuring lots of athleticism by the dancers, including forceful leg and arm thrusts, hopping and twisting.
Later, Jones’ “Love’s Lullaby,” animating the fourth of five sections, slows things down for an intimate duet between Seth York and Megan Storey. In the second section, set to Chet Baker’s version of the Rodgers and Hart classic “My Funny Valentine,” York is featured in a straw hat, sliding around the stage.
“I just saw him in that solo, his longness, the sinewy way he has about him, but also a little mystery, a little edge of darkness,” Battle says.
He calls it his favorite love song because of the lyrics’ unusual point of view. “Your looks are laughable, un-photographable,” Baker croons. “Yet you're my favorite work of art. Is your figure less than Greek? Is your mouth a little weak when you open it to speak? … But don't change your hair for me, not if you care for me.”
“That's such a powerful statement, to see somebody's flaws and at the end of it, say, ‘Don't change your hair,’” Battle explains. “For me, the words are just so rich.”
For raucous comedy in the third and fifth sections, he turned to the Dizzy Gillespie nonsense classic, “Salt Peanuts,” the title rhythmically repeated over and over, and “Bad Dog No Biscuits” by the contemporary Japanese blues-jazz band Seatbelts. They’re linked by the physical humor of company dancer Elliott Trahan’s cartwheeling, windmilling clown character.
“They remind me of be-bop,” Battle says.
Details
Nov. 21-23 at Moody Performance Hall, 2520 Flora St. $27-$69. brucewooddance.org.
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