Above the fray

Parsons Dance's musical moves

January 22, 2008 6:16:46 PM

CELEBRATING LIFE: Parsons.

Modern dance choreographers from Martha Graham onward have sometimes been described as too abstract or inaccessible. But David Parsons has often had the opposite reaction from critics, who seemed baffled by humor in modern dance or cynical about the strong connection his work makes to its audiences. His 20-year-old company, Parsons Dance, speaks for itself and will present a program of six pieces on February 7 at Rhode Island College (call 401.456.8144).

Parsons danced with the Paul Taylor Dance Company for nine years, then guested with New York City Ballet and the White Oak Project, among many others. He has made more then 70 works for his 10-dancer company, but he also directs and produces other projects: he just helmed Astor Piazzola’s Maria de Buenos Aires, and he’s headed to Italy to direct a production of Hair.

I caught up with him on a New York street, cellphone and coffee cup in hand, buoyant with the company’s recent two-week run at the Joyce and a burgeoning collaboration with the East Village Opera Company. We spoke about the sources of his work and some of the pieces to be performed in Providence.

“I’m blessed with wanting the audience to get something out of all my works,” he emphasized. “So there is always a thread through — I feel that it’s important that I have that. Music is the inspiration on a day-to-day basis, because it throws you into different structures.”

A good example is the dance Union, which is like a giant eight-minute puzzle, in which the dancers move around each other in intricate patterns, interspersed with lifts. Parsons always values his collaborators, in this case, Donna Karan (costumes), Academy Award-winning composer John Corigliano, and Tony Award-winning lighting designer Howell Binkley, with whom Parsons founded the company in 1985.

Indeed, Parsons is proud of the company being able to travel with no sets, creating their performance just from the movement of the human body, plus the costumes and lights. He actually makes dances with the lighting cues in his head, because he has worked so long with Binkley that he knows the designer can carry them out.

“Lighting is my muse,” Parsons noted. “I started this company with Caught [his signature piece] already finished. Light is the fastest thing we know in the universe; it also means life. Light makes me play with time ’cause you’re dealing with that spark of time the audience sees the performer.”

In Caught, the solo dancer looks suspended in the air, as a strobe light, at 1/5000th of a second, flashes and the dancer leaps and jumps.

“Caught is flight,” he continued. “Most people have dreamt of flying. Everything I do has a slight connection to our everyday existence. That’s what turns me on.”

The speed of light could also be a metaphor for the quickness of movement in Closure, a 16-minute marathon that Parsons developed with the stamina and athleticism of his dancers in mind, after looking at Olympic competitors.

“You actually see a body blur in front of your eyes — that’s how fast they’re moving,” Parsons admitted. “And it’s relentless. But they go through a journey together and they all survive.”

Parsons Dance has always had a rigorous touring schedule, and outside the US, they are best-known in Italy and Brazil. It was at a performance in Rio that Parsons first met composer Milton Nascimento, who was so enthusiastic about the dancers that he wanted to make a score for the company. The result was a piece aptly titled Nascimento, and for the RIC performance, the dancers will present a second piece, Nascimento Novo.

Another work that grew out of Parsons’s fascination with a musician is In the End, set to five songs by Dave Matthews. Parsons feels a close affinity for Matthews’s populist leanings and his political ideas.

“In the dance, you see people really pushing people around and showing their arrogant power,” he explained. “But in the end, they celebrate life; they get above the fray. You only have one life to live, and you can’t let fear-mongers and politicians take that away from you.”

As for “getting” modern dance, Parsons had one last piece of advise: “If you look at a wave or a tree, you don’t say it doesn’t look right, because that wave is perfect.”