INTERVIEW: Teresa Fellion offers choreographic respite from negative news
Photo: BodyStories: Teresa Fellion Dance is presenting a new dance piece centered on a healing response to the negative news cycle. Photo courtesy of BodyStories / Provided by Michelle Tabnick PR with permission.
The negative news of the day, most of it political, has been constant and debilitating for years. Some people seem to enjoy the constant bickering on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and CNBC. For others, keeping up with the doom and gloom proves to be a draining, unwelcome experience.
Choreographer Teresa Fellion, of BodyStories: Teresa Fellion Dance, has an answer to the negativity. Her new dance piece is called reeling -> healing, and it centers on the frustration and helplessness one feels in the face of this never-ending news cycle. Featuring original music by Kevin Keller, the choreographic creation calls for community and togetherness.
Performances of reeling -> healing run through Saturday, Dec. 1 at Triskelion Arts’ Muriel Schulman Theater in Brooklyn, New York. Paired with the piece is The Warm-Up, which first premiered earlier this year.
Recently, Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Fellion about her pathway to finding healing amidst the negativity. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
What inspired reeling -> healing?
I’ve been an activist and actively working in social justice since I was a teenager. I am all about taking action and working together as communities, both in communities I have been involved with in the United States and internationally in Europe, Central America and Africa. However, possibly how others have experienced the past couple of years too with this current administration, I have been feeling distraught and like there are seemingly insurmountable barriers put up against social and environmental progress that had previously been in the works.
We have been going backwards the past couple of years, and even though I still take action, I couldn’t help but feel infuriated and frustrated. Those feelings aren’t something I would normally let surface because I thought of them as less productive. However, digging into them, I found their ability to be transformative and further inspiring towards affecting change, unexpectedly similar to a healing process I experience as a victim of sexual abuse. Sadly there are emotional parallels to personal and political reeling, healing and action, especially when current policies are filled with falsehoods and personal attacks on humanity.
I chose to let those aspects of existence come out in this piece and not keep it quiet. reeling -> healing was inspired by my own feelings of frustration and helplessness in response to the 24-hour news cycle of hate and violence.
Did you find that the piece helped you with an emotional / creative response to so much negativity in the world?
It has definitely been a helpful process and one I know will grow over the course of its performances as well because it involves audience interaction. Connecting and reflecting with the dancers in order to build this work has strengthened us as a group, and I’m curious to see what new angles will come from audience members. Each person reflecting, cultivating their voice, living their truth and listening to the perspectives of others is where we are most alive and connected.
How much time do you spend with the dancers discussing the themes of the piece?
We discuss the themes of the piece often, and we have worked with a lot of images centered on social injustice, such as reflections on gun violence in schools, examples of dehumanization and sexual assault. These examples and others are vast issues, and we never claimed to cover them fully and speak from every perspective. We continued research and investigation in an informed way, so we could respond physically and mentally as truthfully and authentically as possible.
We also held an open rehearsal at Alvin Ailey American Dance Center in mid-October where everyone involved in the work took turns responding to questions from the audience including the dancers, composers and myself. It was a really rewarding experience that pushed us all to think about not just the overall themes of the work but how they emerge and shift throughout each section as the piece progresses, and how processing and conversations are one of the steps that move us forward in continuing to take action.
Is the choreography complicated or challenging for the dancers?
reeling -> healing definitely has challenging moments. There are a lot of partnering sections, where dancers need to connect quickly and be in sync during a fast passage of time and space. There are multiple coordinations and unique rhythmic sequences that took a lot of repetition and practice, as well as movement that made the dancers feel ‘wild’ and ‘crazy’ at first, during voracious movement explorations in conjuring up the emotions described above.
How would you describe the other work being performed, The Warm-Up?
The Warm-Up is a piece about where exercise meets dance and about finding humor in physicality and aspects of human character while exercising. It’s amped up, almost like exercise in a new dimension, with high energy music, glittery costumes and endless exercise props. It is like a stylized, adult, romper room. Intricate choreography and too much fun! I love how you can get taken through different worlds of exercise, while still being drawn into the character relationship developments onstage and all of the movement itself. There’s a lot going on under that fun first layer!
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
BodyStories: Teresa Fellion Dance presents reeling -> healing and The Warm-Up through Saturday, Dec. 1 at Triskelion Arts’ Muriel Schulman Theater in Brooklyn, New York. Click here for more information and tickets.
