The piece the dancers were performing, “Overtones,” is one of nine to be showcased at the IU Contemporary Dance Theater's “Winter Dance Concert: Leading Edges.”
“I’m interested in perception generally, like the perception of movement or touch or hearing because dancers are always tuning in to their perceptions,” Carter said. “We’re asking the audience to tune into very specific perceptions when they see dance.”
Other pieces are by guest artists Angie Houser and Kyle Abraham and IU faculty Elizabeth Shea, Iris Rosa, Nya McCarthy-Brown, Stephanie Nugent and George Pinney.
Guest artists Connie Dinapoli, Adriane Fang and Arturo Garcia will collaborate with Shea on her pieces.
Carter was inspired by the work of renowned 20th century artist Josef Albers, she said. Color theory played a significant role in the construction of her piece.
“The costumes are dyed the colors that are most mutable to perception,” said Selene Carter, choreographer of the piece. “Then the lighting designer plays with overtones when they pass a color onto those colors, they change the costumes.”
The audience’s perception of hearing is manipulated by Voces Novae, a community choir directed by Susan Swaney.
Before the rehearsal, the singers warmed up their vocal chords by manipulating vowel sounds with their voices, nasally distorting the pitch until it sounded like a buzz saw, Swaney said. That atypical choral sound makes it easier to create overtones.
“Physically, what you do to create overtones is to find a root tone,” Swaney said. “Then you manipulate the tongue so that it throws the sound hard against certain surfaces of the mouth. We’re using the architecture of the inside of the mouth to make the upper overtones louder.”
Carter wanted a piece to go with her choreography that made the audience feel more connected to the dancers, she said, which is why she chose to have a live choir perform.
“I wanted the audience to feel the resonance and the reverberations of the sound waves in the space that they were in, and to know that the dancers were moving through that field of sound,” Carter said.
Senior Jessilyn Gibas and junior Sydney Sizemore are dancers in the production.
They said they only ever heard the accompanying vocals once on a recording before the Monday night rehearsal. Sizemore said the live vocals would add a mystical, ethereal quality to the performance.
Sizemore said the lighting and how it plays with the colors of the costumes created an effect that ties into the dancers’ movement, which is not always strictly predetermined.
“When the light hits them, they can look completely different,” Sizemore said. “That’s part of the improvisation of it, that it’s not what it actually is. It’s exciting because it’s different every time; you get that sense of exhilaration.”
The dancing appears to be planned out, Gibas said, but the free-flowing spontaneity shows through in the mixture of elegant kicks along with twirls with robotic shuffling and tight spins.
There are set moments in the choreography, but the dancers are free to make many choices throughout.
“It’s kind of like a game because you get to choose what you want to do from the phrases that we’ve made,” Gibas said. “Everyone is in different places onstage every time, so you have to move around the different people and figure out what you want to do.”
Carter said the improvisational aspect of the piece means that the dancers always have to be aware of their surroundings, just like the perceptions of color and sound.
“I played a lot with different things when we were developing the dance about hearing and seeing and what it’s like to be a moving body,” Carter said. “A simple different tone of orange can change your perception of green. I’m just fascinated by it.”
