In addition to dancing frequently with live musician/composers—pianist D.A. Young, improvisation artists Gianni Mimmo and Vinny Golia, electric violinist David Strothers, and wind instrumentalist Ray Pizzi to name a few—I have enjoyed the grand opportunity to create new work and perform with concert orchestras, beginning with my 1986 guest invitational with the Los Angeles County’s Inglewood Symphony Orchestra with Maestro Leroy E. Hurte conducting. The event, “Pops For Pop,” was a Father’s Day Concert on the green of the Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital. I danced to one of my favorite Gustav Mahler works, “Adagietto,” from his Symphony No. 5.
Another invitational came from the Northern Nevada Concert Orchestra now the Ruby Mountain Symphony (http://rubymountainsymphony.8m.net/index.html) with Maestro George Rosenberg conducting. I created new choreography and danced to two sections of Ferde Grofe’s “Grand Canyon Suite”: ‘Sunrise’ and ‘Cloudburst.’ The venue was the Elko Convention Hall nestled in the Ruby Mountain valley range in eastern Nevada. (https://exploreelko.com/meetings/).
In 2001 the Reno Chamber Orchestra invited me as its Guest Solo Dance Artist—a first—to join them on the Nightingale Concert Hall of the University of Nevada, Reno for its winter season (https://www.renochamberorchestra.org/). I made a new work and danced Edward Elgar’s “Elegy,” another exquisite composition for my aesthetic exploration. 2020 became the year I officially gave my farewell concert performance.
At the height of the Covid pandemic I was graced with an invitation from the Reno Philharmonic Orchestra. I created and danced to Camille Saint-Saens’s “The Swan.” Even though I’d been investigating the swan trope since, well, apparently the swan has been dogging me since the time I witnessed Maya Plisetskaya dance Mikhail Fokine’s The Dying Swan with the Bolshoi when I was small girl, I’d consciously avoided approaching the Saint-Saens music. But having gotten an invitation to dance with the Reno Phil’s performance of the short composition on the Pioneer Center for the Arts stage, it was not an invitation to turn down. I made a dance. And to my deep (and often) surprised delight, the subtle and timely metaphoric emblems just happened to be there, making their appearance from m sub-conscious. In fact and as I shared with Maestro Laura Jackson, the dance came to me almost instantly,—the imagery of the arc of the dance fully formed in my mind’s eye (what most often occurs for me). The rest is Trust. A’ho.
Solo Dance Artist with Concert Orchestra
