Adams Company Dance presents “Behind the Lens 2” at the Producers Club in NYC on November 23rd at 7:30pm.  From the Baryshnikov Arts Center to the shores of Silver Sands State Park in CT and everywhere in between,  Adams and filmmaker Amelia Golden, weave dancers into their unique settings to create film shorts that are visually stunning, whimsical and emotionally stirring. Included in the evening is the director’s award-winning documentary, “Except at Night: The Making of a Dance,” by filmmaker, Benjamin Moss. This year Adams shares a new short, “Hush Little Child,” to the compendium of short dance films.

This event is free! Seating is limited so please RSVP!

Producers Club: 358 W. 44th Street, NYC.

Contact Don Adams: 203-829-4767 or email: adamscodancegm@gmail.com

It was fourteen years ago today that our nation suffered a great catastrophe. 9/11 stirred our souls and changed our lives forever. It was one month after that horrific day that I was an invited guest artist at Wichita State University. My dear friend and colleague, Nick Johnson, was then, and is still Chair of the dance department there. His lovely wife, Sabrina, is on the faculty and they both teach the most extraordinary classes, and choreograph very intelligent and creatively-thought-provoking work. I landed there knowing that I needed to address my feelings about those awful events that had just taken place, just one month prior. I guess I could’ve choreographed a simple, dancey-dance to something light and airy to off-set my heavy emotions, but instead, I wrestled with the the event head-on, and and used my guest artist time as therapy to choreograph a piece that I titled, “Unthinkable Equation.”  Not exactly Martha Graham’s “Dances After Catastrophe” from “Chronicle,” but similar intention. Nick and Sabrina told me one morning while I was staying with them, that I had been screaming at the top of my lungs in the middle of the night. I hadn’t recalled much, but what that did tell me, is that I must’ve been suffering PTSD.

It was after my residency, however, that something wonderful occurred. Sabrina and the students presented to me this Capezio box containing what would become my motivating dance shoes for years to come: Cheetahs! They became my non-red, Red Shoes. Remember the The Red Shoes? You can google it. These became my favorite pair of jazz shoes to date, my Cheetahs… and sad to say, it’s time to retire them. The black rubber soles are flaking off on every studio floor I dance on, leaving pieces of rubber behind, as if tiny pieces of a dance I had been choreographing had been lost to those chunks of Cheetah goodness–those magic shoes helped mold numerous artistic undertakings, and held such sentimental value for me.

Of course, these shoes have become obsolete, as does most great dance attire and footwear in the dance world. They had a cool split-sole, and they made my pointe look better than what it is. My barre work excelled with my Cheetahs, and I was excited to create new dances with my happy, pointed feet! However, as the soles broke off, and I found myself  cleaning up after my mess in studios far and wide, I finally had to make the decision to let them go. The broken sole disintegration seemed symbolic in part, as I wondered if parts of myself were flaking off along with the rubber. It’s been a summer of letting go and taking time for rest, renewal and inward reflection. It began with saying goodbye to dancer, Ryan Schmidt, as the sun set in NYC on a hot, sticky day. James Pierce, longtime friend and dancer of ACD,  joined us as we toasted her new home near Chicago, where her husband landed a new job. My heart was heavy that day. Though so elated for her, it felt like yet another piece of that black sole falling off. She was, and is a gem that brought so many vital contributions to ACD. As she continues to dance and perform in an aerial company, I’ll dream of her touching down in NYC again to dazzle me with her amazing talent.

Letting go IS  hard… it often finds us looking back, which clearly I’ve been doing. I googled my first dance teacher, Hedy Tower, the other day, to see if she was still alive. I came to find out that she passed away three years ago. I felt remiss in not getting back in touch with her after all of these years. I learned that she had been teaching up until the age of 99! What the what?? I was five when I first started dancing with her in Jenkintown, PA. I was terrified when she beat her gong and made us act out being witches. I remember having to put a fake wart on my face and wear a black dress and tall, pointy hat, as we did our first public performance at my grade school. Of course, later in life, I had an a-ha moment, as I sat in my first dance history class learning about German dance pioneer, Mary Wigman, and her famous “Witch Dance,” and how that dance resembled what I had learned when I was five. Oh THAT’S what Hedy was making us do! Though shocking to my system at such a young age, it was Hedy that taught us to “let go” of our fears and to risk making a fool of ourselves… she impressed that it’ll be good for you.

Summer 2015… more letting go.  No witches in site, but lots of old stuff to toss out, not just shoes, but old tapes, and not just the ones in my head. VHS tapes. Digitizing is time consuming and yet necessary this day and age to preserve those antiquated tapes. I have much transferring to do, all in an effort to save my vintage work before it ends up like my broken rubber soles. The humidity can ruin VHS tapes so fast, and so time is not on my side with this job. Letting go of the old technology has not been easy. If it were up to me, I’d still be cooking food in the toaster oven, and turning the knob right on the TV to change channels. I like buttons, knobs and switches. I abhor touch screens. There’s so much room for error, and I’m sure you can agree that there’s more malfunctioning going on now than in the past. Ok, so more letting go. 

Looking back at my old jazz class pedagogy this summer, it dawned on me that the material really needed to be passed on. Let go of that, too. Like my fist dance teacher teaching me the “Witch Dance,” I wanted to pass on a tradition of jazz dance that could be archived with a suitable and trusted dance enthusiast. After a briefing with my ‘daughta from anothah motha’ and beautiful dancer, Annie Heinemann, we decided to book studio time and revisit the hour-long warm-up I created back in 2006 for my students at WMU.

We broke it all down, and got most of it back, with a few holes here and there. My last stint with my Cheetahs  was with Annie. We chuckled as we watched the shedding rubber pieces fall onto the studio floor! Passing down this warm-up class to her has been a fun and rewarding process. She is a skillful teacher, and has it all together as a dancer… among other works, you’ve seen her in “A Dress in the Stream.”  With a few more rehearsals, and a few changes here and there,  I think we’ll get it back. The mix of the old theater-dance style, with contemporary modern, should get her students at Greenwich Academy working hard, and hopefully they will come to appreciate the heritage of the jazz dance… sooner than their first dance history class — fingers crossed.

So, with time to ruminate on my many walks this summer on the beach, I finally made the decision to let goof that old rubber-90s website, and start anew. Dumping pages and ideas that no longer were relevant was humbling, and yet encouraging. Taking stock of what was good, and throwing out the rest has been a daunting task after nearly thirty-years of making work. OMG!! I visited Tucson this summer and went back to my alma mater. Yep, it was 29 years ago I started graduate school. My soles were fresh and raring to go then. I started right in on choreography and somehow, never let go of it. With so many years, so many tales, so many dances, so many dancers, and so much time, energy, and not to mention MONEY, I still am finding within my soul, a place that holds sacred those creative urges. Those old, broken pieces of sole are thrown away, but the memories of those times past will forever be imprinted upon my soul. And from this day forward, it won’t be the same, but I’m sure I’ll still somehow get to the pointe! Oh, and please don’t forget to revisit the Beatles, Rubber Sole. One of my favs– I’ll never let go of that one! Stay tuned for my new website!

As this Summer begins and I prepare my tote bag for the beach, I also have to unload my dance bag and head for the laundromat. Time has gotten away from me, and I haven’t yet laundered the costumes that put me in high gear this past Spring. Typically, in a week or so after a gig, I do all the post-clean-up, but with my heavy workload, a trip to my former residence in Tucson, and a short stint in Austin, TX to visit a good friend with my sister, I literally have been on a treadmill and haven’t had time to tumble dry, or process what has simply been a whirlwind of a season.

Except for the initial hiccup with casting, my piece, “Miles”  went to the stage at the end of May in the KoDaFe 2015 Dance Festival at the Ailey Citigroup Theater in NYC. Adams Company Dance has been invited to the festival since its inception, three years ago, and it went off without a hitch. Cultural exchange between artists, choreographers, and dancers united the evening, as we shared a common theme of sharing our origins. My niece, Alana Kirzner, along with Gierre Godley, who previously performed this duet at Ailey, danced beautifully together in this emotionally driven, highly athletic dance. How very proud I was of my niece for her comeback dance performance, after a two and a half year hiatus from dancing, due to an injury. Adding two understudies to our rehearsal period made for a fun time, as I reunited with a former student, Jeremy Neal, from my time at Western Michigan University, and with Ana Estrada, a lovely dancer from my alma mater, University of Arizona. Appropriately titled, “Miles,”  the mileage this dance has driven so far, had more miles to go, and the dancers certainly drove it home with their bold performance.

With music by three-time Grammy Award winner, Maria Schneider, ( I could never tire of her composition), the dancers strapped in for another tour of duty for this gem of a dance, for which Maria so generously granted permission. As a side note, I was distracted in a really good way this Spring to attend the launch of Maria’s new CD, The Thompson Fields. As I said with her last CD, and I’ll unabashedly state again:  run, don’t walk  to buy this album of pure genius!

Next up was the first annual Film Lab at Triskelion Arts. Annie Heinemann-Church was the lead in our film, “A Dress in the Stream,“ which was selected for this all-dance film festival in a funky neighborhood in Brooklyn. This art-house, laboratory of dance culture, moved to a new location this past season, renewing its vigor and promise of a brighter future– so nice to see the smaller venues gaining such momentum! Being in the company of other like-minded artists, made us all feel like one, big, happy family. Fast forward from the 80s, when Beta was making its debut, we sure have come a long way with dance morphing into new and acceptable mediums in the digital era. I almost had forgotten about live dance that night!!

Simmering with the smell of a stew so rich with ingredients you can taste it’s flavor from around the corner, was our film, “Hush Little Child.” The frigid film shoot, on the last day of February in the freezing cold, still resonated in my mind, yet the days of Spring, with the flurry of activity, disabled me to take this rich pot off the stove for a cooling off and completion; however, that didn’t mean that I wasn’t able to taste-test during March, April and May! With my many trips back and forth to Brooklyn to work with my videographer/editor, Amelia Golden, the stew that once seemed raw and without spice, finally cooked up to the right temperature and flare.  I hope you enjoy our premiere.

So there. I’ve now aired all my dirty laundry from the Spring, my dance bag is cleaned out, and now I can enthusiastically start my Summer, savoring the good memories from our events. Thanks to all the artists who participated in creating our artistic feast!

Amelia Golden Filmmaker	Dancers rehearsing	Film shoot day with Amelia and Alana
Alana and Gierre in “Miles;” Photo by IKADA	Annie in “A Dress in the Stream”

Amid the snow and ice of the last day of February, a day brimming of inspired artistry unfolded with ACD that melted the frozen feelings of a long winter. Inspired by my niece, Alana Kirzner, a stunning dancer with a fierce energy and supermodel look, I loosely wrote a script for a new film short. Amelia Golden, filmmaker and collaborator with ACD, joined our project for a day of artistic discovery in NYC, beginning at Ripley Grier Studios in NYC, and ending at the Botanical Gardens in the Bronx.

Alana brought it all to the table with her technical finesse and dramatic edge, portraying a character that oddly came to life once the costume pieces were donned. A spirit came alive; however, when this black, velvet dress and shrug, hung on a pipe in my basement to air out and de-wrinkle after I brought it home form the thrift store. It was then, in the dark shadows, that it swayed side to side, ever so gently, that I could see a mysterious woman from the turn-of-the century living in it, or could it also be the spirit of Madeline from the famous children’s book? No matter the origin, Alana awakened her own spirit to flesh out the character she became that day, both indoor in the studio, and outdoor at the Botanical Gardens, where we choreographed a frosty frenzy of quick-study exhibitions on the snowy, wooded paths. We ended at the gorgeous Haupt Conservatory at the Chandelier Orchid exhibit, where we warmed it up for a supreme finale among the fertile plant-life and blossoming flowers… we were loose, fluid and filled with a taste of Spring in the air! Stay tuned for our new film–coming soon!!

Film shoot day with Amelia and Alana

A year’s worth of creating, polishing and processing new work has come to a humbling end. Placing these fine collectibles into this year’s treasure trunk has me joyfully reminiscing about the many months of studio sweat, theater dust and reams of film footage.

Goddess Danu and Birds Over Lower Lough Erne, a commissioned work by composer, Claudia Howard Queen, began my journey into 2014 and sent me into Celtic motion. Ryan Schmidt rose to a mystical, new level when she danced her fairy good performance in Brooklyn at Triskelion Arts, where we also had a sneak-peak of several of our film shorts, in collaboration with filmmaker, Amelia Golden.

Next was the KoDaFe Dance festival in NYC at the Manhattan Movement and Arts Center, where Milan Misko and Nana Tsuda performed Descendence, a touching duet about how our ancestry links us to our life’s journey. This was ACD’s 2nd invitation working with the IKADA Contemporary Dance Company.

I was honored to have been able to work with the extraordinarily talented Chris Jackson again,  for the creation of the new solo, Flight, and our new film short, Sea Chapter. Composer, Tamara Wilcox added her musical talent to Chris’s solo with her inspiring piano composition. ACD is proud to now have two scores of Tamara’s in our repertoire. Returning to Triskelion Arts again, Chris gave the most soulful performance of Flight, effortlessly moving through the space, as I wiped away my tears from the front row. We waded our way through the waters of Silver Sands State Park,  making our companion film short to the solo, capturing beautiful scenery, including breathtaking views of the sun setting over the calm ocean waves.

Flipping through the short films I’ve done, with collaborators Benjamin Moss and Amelia Golden, I was aching to be able to work this compendium of films into a production where we could share what we’ve done in a proper screening room. After a brief search to find a venue for my vision, I was able to secure a night at the Producers Club in NYC this December, where we included our documentary, Except at Night: The Making of a Dance, giving the audience insider information into my process of making a dance. The whole evening, entitled, Behind the Lens, tied all the frames together, giving a glimpse of the past five years of seeing things from the camera’s point of view. It was a thrill to know that some of the dancers involved were sitting in the seats, as so many over the years have scattered over the globe. I was lucky to have been able to raise my glass and toast with a few of them afterward, as we celebrated some of our greatest shared treasures.

Benjamin Moss Filmmaker	Amelia Golden Filmmaker	Claudia Howard Queen Composer
Tamara Wilcox Composer