Imagine playing charades and having to act out the word “blue” or “tarnish” or “catastrophes.”
Now imagine handing a choreographer a list of 30 words and asking them to create a dance.
That’s essentially what Dallas’ Pegasus Contemporary Ballet is exploring through its “Common Language” performances happening April 3 and 4 at the Kalita Humphreys Theater.
The performance is produced in partnership with The Writer’s Garret.
Dreaming of a ‘Common Language’
For close to a decade, the Dallas-based literary group has hosted an annual poetry contest.
The group selects a theme and a list of 30 words, then issues a call for poetry. This year, the theme is “time.”
Writers from anywhere in the world can submit entries, but they must use every word on the list and the poem must be 30 lines or fewer.
The 30 best works are put into an anthology and the writers are invited to read their work at the Dallas is Lit! Literary Festival in May. It’s one of The Writer’s Garret’s signature programs.
Diana Crowder, Pegasus’ artistic director and founder, said the concept blew her mind and she wondered what it would look like if the same list was translated through dance.
So, this year, the groups collaborated.
The company dancers brainstormed movements for each word. From there, four local choreographers took the reins and created dances using every gesture from the list.
Translating words into movements
Emma Krusling is a member of Pegasus’ dance company. However, as a choreographer for this project, she did not attend the brainstorming session with the other dancers.
“The first time I saw all 30 [movements] I was nervous. I was on the phone with my mom and was like, ‘It will happen somehow, but I don’t know how yet,’” Krusling said.
“I’ve been dancing with the majority of these women two and a half years now. While I still had that feeling of anxiety that this was a big challenge, I was set up in a way that I knew this was gonna happen.”
The poems for the anthology haven’t been selected yet, but one of the choreographers wrote one of her own for the dance.
‘The goal is just to make you feel something’
For Krusling, it’s less important that people see her choreography and understand the moments in her life that inspired it, and more important that people are able to relate it to their own experiences.
“The goal is just to make you feel something, and I think there's validation in coming away with your own interpretation,” she said.
“You never know exactly how things are gonna read in the moment, so one person who sees it Friday night might have a completely different idea than Saturday, and I think that's what makes this artform so fulfilling and rewarding for me.”
In short, audiences don’t need to worry about sussing out a poem from each dance.
“The point once you get into the theater is not so much, I think, to try to identify or to ‘Where’s Waldo’ these words as you’re watching, but to see how those shapes and gestures combine in different ways,” Aaron Glover, executive director of The Writer’s Garret, said.
Maybe the performance will inspire you to try your hand at poetry. Or maybe they will prompt you to seek out other poets’ work. Or maybe they will change how you think about dance.
Performances of “Common Language” will take place at 8 p.m. April 3-4 at the Kalita Humphreys Theater, 3636 Turtle Creek Blvd., Dallas. Tickets are $22-$56.
Got a tip? Email Marcheta Fornoff at mfornoff@kera.org.
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