It was last Saturday evening when “Encounters and Collisions” first took place at Ruth N. Halls Theatre in the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center. It was the first show of the semester for IU Contemporary Dance.
“Welcome everyone,” Production Director Elizabeth Shea said at the beginning of the showcase. “We have an amazing show for you tonight.”
The first piece was Ihsan Rustem’s “Long Story Short.” A lean and built figure stood in the shadows. Wrapped in a burgundy half dress, he twitched violently under a spotlight, moving in tune to the music.
“Catherinette” by Selene Carter came later and was choreographed in a medieval French style. The piece was accompanied by the live performance of the song “Il delirio amoroso.” Megan Roth, Eunji Lee and Kyongwook Min were the soprano, harpsichord and cello ?musicians.
Two female dancers took the stage in identical dresses of medieval French style, colored in green and red. They danced in quick and small movements, and the hyper style caused laughter in the audience.
The audience was then led into a strong piece, “Wanted.” Choreographed by Nyama McCarthy-Brown, the piece was inspired by the deaths of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., Jordan Davis in Jacksonville, Fla., and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. The dance involved the poem “Love What I Love,” written by Roger Bonair-Agard, and was performed by David Koté.
Approaching the end of the show, two boys were led on to the stage, where they sat playing with a rubber ball. They were the only moving figures among seventeen dancers wearing white hoodies.
“It was actually my son Isaiah’s debut on the stage,” said Ghangis DeDan Carter, the director of Recruitment and Retention for Underrepresented Students in the School of Education.
“Nyama and few other colleagues inquired about having children on the stage, and I let my son join the show. The other child was my son’s classmate,” ?he said.
Isaiah Carter said he wasn’t nervous.
He “just felt really great and had a lot of fun,” ?he said.
However, Ghangis DeDan Carter said there was something deeper involved in his son’s participation in the piece besides being proud and having a debut experience in a contemporary dance performance.
“I think contemporary dance is something that needs to be,” Carter said. “It’s a social voice that needs to be in our society today. The dance shows how people in our society today care about social events around us. It’s a very strong and moving way to express ourselves in front of our current social challenges.”
Shea said “Encounters and Collisions,” along with the 2015 IU Contemporary Dance winter concert as a whole, was a huge success.
“We all feel excited that the audience response was so positive and also are so proud of the dancers who danced so beautifully,” Shea said in an email. “The diversity in programming and the dancers’ ability to perform so many different styles and approaches really made it an exciting evening.”
The audience arrived half an hour early for the concert and hesitated to leave after. Many audience members circled around choreographers and IU faculty members discussing the show.
“I really liked the variety, and I enjoyed being in rehearsals these last few weeks,” Amy Osajima, director of marketing and communications, said in an email. “The Rustem piece was pretty amazing.”
This story has been updated. An earlier version of this article misspelled Isaiah Carter's first name and David Koté's last name.
