21 Yeses. Photo courtesy of New Dialect
Two visiting ensembles bring distinctive approaches to music and movement to the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts in October, with Danish folk trio Stundom performing Saturday, October 10, followed by New Dialect’s contemporary dance work 21 Yeses on Friday, October 23, and Saturday, October 24.
Stundom draws on Danish and Scandinavian folk traditions, pairing violin, cittern and piano in a trio featuring Emma Kragh-Elmøe, Villads Hoffmann and Julian Svejgaard. Hoffman and Kragh-Elmøe began playing as a duo near the end of high school and later met Svejgaard at music school. “We played our first concert together on a tiny island in Denmark with almost no rehearsal,” says Kragh-Elmøe. “That’s when we realized that the three instruments could really melt into one another and create something almost symphonic. ”
The musicians compose their own melodies while remaining grounded in the dance and fiddle music at the heart of Scandinavian folk traditions. They first realized how distinctive their sound could be for international listeners when they performed outside Denmark at Celtic Connections in Scotland.
“It is a bit like hearing your own accent for the first time when you leave home—you don’t really notice it until you’re somewhere else,” says Kragh-Elmøe. “It feels very special to bring a small piece of Denmark to people who may have Danish or Scandinavian roots themselves.”
Later in the month, New Dialect returns to Wortham with 21 Yeses, choreographed by Nashville-based dance artist Banning Bouldin. Bouldin has spent much of her career collaborating across disciplines, working with artists in fields ranging from sculpture to technology. For 21 Yeses, she collaborated with longtime friend and production and lighting designer Michael Brown, who introduced her to the wireless LED light tubes known as Titan Tubes that became the foundation for the production.
“I was really interested in exploring how we could use these lights as sculptural devices between the dancers, so that their movements would create their own lighting design,” Bouldin said. “Everybody was thinking of themselves not just as dancers but as kinetic sculpture makers.”
21 Yeses also draws inspiration from Hannah Emerson’s poem “The Center of the Universe.” Emerson, a nonspeaking autistic poet, writes about moving into darkness and discovering an internal source of light.
“She talks about going into the darkness, into the void in ourselves, the places that we fear to look at—we’re courageous to go there,” Bouldin says. “I thought that was such a gorgeous way for us to think about the kind of light and voids that we were trying to co-create in the piece and also experience inside the piece.”
The Wortham Center for the Performing Arts is located at 18 Biltmore Avenue in downtown Asheville. To learn more and purchase tickets, visit WorthamArts.org or call 828.257.4530.
