Latest Art on the Beltline, "MENT" features aerial dancers
Atlanta choreographer Joanna Brooks knows her latest show -- a “modern and aerial dance exhibition” called “MENT” -- might propel her dance company to a higher tier of local recognition.
“There’s organic growth for all the non-traditional and contemporary arts around Atlanta,” she says. “Now people are into what’s free, and everybody’s got gadgets buzzing in their pockets distracting them. It’s not enough to make them buy a ticket and sit in front of a proscenium for two hours.”
“MENT” plays into all that’s trendy today. It’s a site-specific outdoor work of mixed-media performance art centered on the dancers that features a series of seemingly unrelated elements that come together then disperse, coalesce then splinter. Dancers, musicians and graffiti artists interact as collaborators. Cyclists will ride on the unused railroad bridge that is part of the Beltline, the proposed in-town transit network. All told, the work will involve some 20 performers.
And essential to the performance is the audience. “At any given point,” says Brooks, “the crowd will have many vantage points. There’s a lot to see, happening simultaneously and across several blocks.”
About the work’s title, Brooks explains that “-ment” is the suffix for the three words she and her collaborators zeroed in on when creating the artwork: moment, movement and pavement.
What’s clear is that site-specific dance-music-audience events, like “MENT,” are springing up all over Atlanta, and drawing enthusiastic reviews and a sizable audience. Perhaps the most notable was “Bloom,” performed in February in Buckhead’s Lenox Square Mall by Atlanta’s gloATL dance troupe, led by choreographer Lauri Stallings.
But Brooks and Company Dance was actually there earlier. The company formed in 2005 to perform a site-specific work in historic Oakland Cemetery.
In the intervening years, Brooks moved away from those modern à go-go events to the more traditional, Martha Graham-centered style of ballet, which puts a premium on technique and abstract dance. They still operate on a shoestring, performing two shows a year on a $20,000 budget.
“Lauri [Stallings] has infused all of us with the sense that anything is possible, on any scale,” Brooks says. “It’s incredible, you start to see small modern dance companies, contemporary dancers, aiming higher artistically than almost anyone in town. It gives us a lot of hope.”
Pierre Ruhe is classical music critic of www.ArtsCriticATL.com
EVENT PREVIEW
Art on the Beltline presents "MENT," performed by Brooks and Company Dance. 7:30 p.m. June 27. On and under the Fulton Terrace Railroad Bridge, between Kirkwood and Memorial Dr. S.E., in Reynoldstown. www.brooksandcompanydance.org
