Once again, Vero’s Riverside Dance Festival promises to outdo itself this weekend with a stellar contemporary company in a guest performance, the season opener of Ballet Vero Beach.
Eight dancers from the Wylliams-Henry Contemporary Dance Company from Kansas City, Mo., will perform two concerts Friday and Saturday on Riverside Theatre’s main stage. That theater holds 700, and if the fraction of one work I saw in rehearsal last week is any indication, the house by all rights should sell out both nights.
Powerful and polished, the company’s dancers are reason enough to see the performance. Making it even more compelling is the choreography, whose significance is the repertory company’s raison d’etre.
Since its inception, the company has sought to create a living archive of underperformed works by important American choreographers. Among the pieces in store for Vero audiences: “Church of Nations,” the 1991 work of Kevin Iega Jeff that has become well-known in modern dance circles around the world. In costumes inspired by priest’s vestments, dancers “question whether religious leaders should ever come out in favor or war,” says Schnell.
“Esperando nin Silencio,” the choreography of company artistic director and co-founder Mary Pat Henry, is inspired by a protest by mothers of the thousands of “disappeared” in Argentina. Henry created the piece early in the company’s 25-year history.
A third piece, “Twisted Metal,” by the San Francisco-based choreographer Gregory Dawson, was created for the company and premiered only last year. Known for his muscular risk-taking works, Dawson set the piece to electronic music he himself composed along with Damacio Payhamo.
The dancers, along with the company’s artistic director Mary Pat Henry and rehearsal director DeeAnna Hiett, have been in Vero since July 24 to teach the Riverside festival’s fifth summer intensive. One of hundreds held around the country, summer intensives are essentially camps for auditioned pre-professional students of classical ballet and modern dance.
Three apprentices admitted to the program will join the company in its performance, as will professional ballet dancer Camilo Rodriguez, an instructor at Riverside and ballet master of Ballet Vero Beach. He has been an audience favorite at every past performance.
Every summer since 2013, Ballet Vero Beach has collaborated with Riverside Theatre to offer on its stage a performance by the faculty of the Riverside Dance Festival summer intensive. That performance has double billing as both the festival finale and the first concert of the season for Ballet Vero Beach.
Because the camp hosts different companies each year, Vero audiences have enjoyed a range of contemporary dance styles.
“Historically this is our biggest seller of the season, and it’s not even our company,” says Adam Schnell, co-founder of Ballet Vero Beach and director of dance at Riverside Theatre. He attributes that enthusiasm to the fact that it’s summer, when fewer offerings compete with the ballet concerts. But there is also an interest in modern dance and contemporary ballet reflected in audience response.
And this concert should be remarkable. Unlike prior modern dance companies who were past associates of Schnell, for this year’s August program, he opened up the selection process by posting a request for proposals on a national dance website.
After big successes with three modern companies for the August show – Boston’s Prometheus Dance, L.A. Contemporary Dance Company and Chicago Repertory Ballet, Schnell picked Wylliams-Henry for its emphasis on diversity, not only of styles of dance but of dancers as well. With more than 100 works in its repertoire, nearly every form of modern dance is represented. And the dancers over the years have represented a broad range of body types and ethnicities.
Even Schnell’s students remarked on it: At a recent class he gave during the summer intensive, three Wylliams-Henry dancers joined in – two very tall African-American dancers, a man and a woman; and an unusually short woman with fair skin and red hair.
As the trio warmed up at the barre in the traditional heel-in-hand full-leg extension over their heads, Schnell realized the rest of the class had stopped to stare. “That was the ultimate teachable moment,” says Schnell. “It’s important to reflect a broader vision of society, and I’m not always able to do that with Ballet Vero Beach. This company is here for those three people.”
The company is known for presenting the works of top American choreographers, particularly works with themes of social justice. The company serves as artist-in-residence at the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Conservatory of Music and Dance. Several of its dancers are current or former students of the conservatory.
Mary Pat Henry, a co-founder with the late Leni Wylliams, is an MFA graduate of Florida State University’s renowned school of dance. In her career, she performed with the San Francisco Ballet and at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. She has choreographed for Dance Theatre of Harlem.
Wylliams, who has won three Emmy Awards, was a soloist with Jose Limon and Netherlands Danse Theatre. As a choreographer, his works are in the repertory of 30 companies worldwide, including the Bolshoi, the Metropolitan Ballet and Boston Opera.
Wylliams and Henry came together by happenstance. They were both in Kansas City when a dance company scheduled to perform at the university had to cancel. As Henry recently told a local newspaper, each of them called every dancer they knew to fill in. The resulting group was the start of the company. But less than five years in, the 35-year-old Wylliams was murdered in his home. Henry was devastated by the death of her partner and friend, but kept the company going in Wylliams’ honor.