Tough to beat
Get pumped for ‘Dances from the Heart’ in Newport
Pacific Dance Ensemble and the Newport School of Artistic Movement present the 36th annual “Dances from the Heart: A Celebration of Spring and Benefit Auction” at the Newport Performing Arts Center this weekend.
This year’s performances will feature works by ensemble and school alumni Amber Star Merkens and Livanna Maislen, neé Marissa Maislen. Guest musician Alex Llumiquinga and his daughter Korayma Llumiquinga Lapham will accompany dancers with live music of the Andes, performing alongside choreography based on dances of the region’s indigenous peoples.
Llumiquinga grew up learning traditional Andean songs from friends and neighbors in the El Inca neighborhood of Quito, Ecuador. He followed his passion for this music by traveling to Europe, Israel and finally the US. Creating a family orchestra, he hopes to make his kids part of the next generation of musicians and keepers of this beautiful traditional music and dance.
The two rhythms you will hear and see performed are fandango and sanjuanito. Both originated in Imbabura, Ecuador, a northern province where many Kichwa speaking indigenous peoples live. Fandango is danced during weddings and the sanjuanito is a pre-Hispanic rhythm now known for honoring St. John, whose holiday coincides with more ancient celebrations of the summer solstice.
The show will also feature guest appearances by members of the Newport High Jazz Band.
In the spirit of jazz music, the choreography accompanying the jazz band numbers will include an element of improvisation. The dance is based on a series of Qigong exercises used in Chinese traditional medicine to improve and maintain health and well-being, which PDE has abstracted and elaborated on, through a process of improvisation to create the dance. The piece the band will play is Herbie Hancock’s well-known jazz favorite, “Watermelon Man.”
As is traditional for this event, there will be a benefit auction featuring an Erte lithograph valued at almost $2,000 and works by local artists including Leighton Blackwell, Ed Cameron, Sal Strom, Amy Pattison, Japanese printmaker Sei, Richard Cabral and more. To liven things up, The Tex Brooklyn Experiment will play in the lobby during the auction, with Robert Rubin on keyboards, Bill Stiffler on bass and harmonica and Morgen Silverhorn on saxophone.
The Lincoln County community web continues to expand as PDE alumni weave themselves into the fiber of new communities and then bring their worlds back to share in this year’s “Dances from the Heart.” The works choreographed by Merkens and Maislen will be directed by Nancy Mittleman.
The ensemble will perform an adaptation of “Ontoyou,” originally choreographed by Merkens while she was attending Juilliard in New York City. After her graduation from Juilliard, she went on to dance in New York with internationally acclaimed Jose Limon Company for two years and then the Mark Morris Dance Group for 12 years. As her children grew to school age, a heavy touring schedule became impractical and Merkens went on to become an herbalist, lactation consultant and doula, while working as rehearsal director for Dance Heginbotham. Jon Heginbotham, who danced many years with Merkens in Mark Morris Dance Group, started his own company, which also tours internationally. Merkens and Heginbotham premiered their new duet, “The Understudies” at Jacob’s Pillow last summer and continue to perform it in concerts across the country in special performances. Merkens also runs the clinic program for Arbor Vitae School of Traditional Herbalism, where third year students work in rural communities.
Maislen received a BFA in Dance at NYU Tisch School of the Arts and has performed dance, theater and aerial installations both nationally and abroad.
While dancer and rehearsal assistant with Time Lapse Dance, a Loie Fuller-inspired company, Maislen led residencies at Hofstra and De Sale’s University. In 2013, she became a performer with the Off-Broadway show “Sleep No More,” where she played eight different roles during her seven-year tenure with Punchdrunk. In 2015, Maislen became dancer and rehearsal assistant for The Francesca Harper Project, where she assisted in projects such as Nick Cave's Bessie Award-winning show “The Let Go,” Nona Hendryx and Carrie Mae Weem's "Refrigerated Dreams" and Austria’s Bregenzer Fruehling’s Tanzfestival. Maislen has performed for Nicole von Arx, Yin Yue, Karole Armitage and the San Francisco Opera.
The success of the ensemble and the school’s collaboration is clearly evident as one looks at the many successes of alumni who have gone on to study and perform in such places as the New York-based Juilliard, Mark Morris Dance Group, the Limon Dance Company, the San Francisco Ballet, the Eugene Ballet and many more.
Performances will take place at 7 pm on Friday and Saturday, June 2 and 3, with a 2 pm matinée on Sunday, June 4. The Newport Performing Arts Center is located at 777 W Olive Street. For more information, go to coastarts.org or call 541-265-2787.