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 Choreographer Ellen Bromberg Pushes Beyond Pure Dance. By Margaret Regan THE YEAR AFTER choreographer Ellen Bromberg put together a collaborative dance piece about a dancer friend dying of AIDS, she had to confront death even more directly. Her father had a heart attack and Bromberg rushed to the intensive care unit to see him. She was too late. Looking into his room, she saw the helpless specialists gathered amidst the high-tech machines of modern medicine. The lights were blinking uselessly, the graphs charting her beloved father's heartbeats were flat, neutral. But of all the horrors, one fixed itself in her memory: the sight of her father's lifeless foot dangling from the bed.
Following the death, Bromberg, a former UA dance prof, was haunted by the thought that "at some level, we are what is animating us. Who are we?" Falling to Earth, a new dance/video work for four dancers playing this weekend at the UA's Lab Theater, tries to answer that question. Like Singing Myself a Lullabye, the award-winning work about the dancer with AIDS, which premiered in Tucson three years ago, the new piece is about identity. Yet it goes much deeper, Bromberg said, into issues of the "body and nature's cycle of birth and death, loss and renewal." Ironically, this new dance about the visceral, begun in the aftermath of a crushing death, is accomplished through the highly technological. Four dancers move among transparent cloth scrims that resemble hospital curtains. They also serve as screens for the videos by Douglas Rosenberg, a prof at the University of Madison who also collaborated with Bromberg on Lullabye. The screens are transparent, so audiences can see through to four or five layers at once, as though they were looking into a hologram. "It's sometimes a dance performance, sometimes an installation, sometimes swimming in a cinematic environment," Bromberg said. "There are 14 speakers, so you have the quality of sound (electronic music by John D. Mitchell) coming from all around you." The video clips feature dancers swimming underwater in a pool ("I originally wanted a tank of water on stage") and the dancers talking about "their first memory of being in their body" and whether they'd ever witnessed a death. The videos also capture a startling Jewish mourning ritual, the ripping of black cloth. Most unusual about the 45-minute work, however, is its use of a new "smart" technology that's been called the Intelligent Stage. "It's a movement-sensing system," Bromberg explained. "The dancers trigger the video and text and sound through their movement. There's a structure, but the piece is different every night. It's like life." Bromberg, an independent choreographer whose work has been staged all around the U.S., in Europe and Japan, said that in recent years she's become less satisfied with pure dance. She's just back from a session at UCLA studying new dance video technologies as a National Dance/Media fellow, and this weekend she's wrapping up a master's at the UA in theatre arts with an emphasis in dance, technology and digital arts. (In fact Falling to Earth is her master's project; she'll rush from a late afternoon graduation ceremony Friday over to the Lab Theater for the evening performances.) And she's spent the last two years working as artist-in-residence at ASU's Intelligent Stage, taking a year to absorb the interactive technology and another year to choreograph the piece with the dancers. Mastering the new techniques has been difficult, she acknowledged, both for choreographer and for dancers (who include two Tucsonans: Mark English, formerly of 10th Street Danceworks; and Jennifer Pollack, once with Orts but now with New Articulations.) But she's pleased with the results. "The space becomes the musical instruments that the dancers play," she said. "It's so beautiful, so subtle. It becomes an extension of the body." Bromberg hasn't spent all her time in recent years on serious avant-garde dance. Just last year, she was hired to choreograph scenes in Kevin Costner's movie The Postman, filmed south of Tucson. Costner, she noted, was not only amiable but "very cute." "It was such a gas!" she said. "Kevin had an idea that was not in the script. It was shot in an open-pit mine in Green Valley. He wanted the bad guys to do a male-bonding movement along the switchbacks. There were 400 guys and I was in the back of a truck with a megaphone." The bad-guy scene unfortunately was left on the cutting-room floor, but another, a festive hoedown in Washington State, made it to the final version. (That scene appears on the movie's preview trailer on the Internet.) And Bromberg and her husband made it to the Hollywood premiere, flashing spotlights, tabloid TV and all. She loved the bizarre Hollywood working method ("There's no rehearsal time: you're flying by the seat of your pants") and might try to do more movies, but it's hard to reconcile filmland's peremptory time demands with her other work. She was called away from Falling to Earth with no notice to work on The Postman, for instance, thus demolishing at a single blow a week's worth of carefully planned rehearsals.
Up next for Bromberg are "guest artist residencies at various
universities. The University of Utah wants the show (Falling
to Earth). And I'm interested in working with visual artists
more. I want to work with collaborators who are interested in
expanding the definitions of dance." Falling to Earth plays Friday and Saturday at the UA Lab Theater, in the Fine Arts Complex southeast of Park Avenue and Speedway. There are two 45-minute shows each evening, at 7 and 9 p.m. A discussion with the artists follows each performance. Tickets are $12 general, $10 for UA faculty and staff, $6 for students and seniors. They're available at the box office. For information or reservations, call 621-1162.
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"I was overwhelmed by the flesh of him, the substance of
him," Bromberg recalled in a café interview last week.
"As a choreographer, I've worked on cadavers a lot in anatomy
class, but here I was facing my own genetic trace, my hand, his
hand. His physical flesh: There was no animation whatsoever."
