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Star Tribune Minneapolis-St. Paul - October 24 2006:
"Smoothing
all is the statuesque pioneer woman
(Carrie Ellmore-Tallitsch), who cast her aura of earthbound memory over the
piece......."
Ballet Talk Madison Wisconsin - October 22 2006:
"..... the best
was watching lead dancer Carrie
Ellmore-Tallitsch use her swinging left foot to mark time on the stage floor (as
if she was a human metromone)
while the rest of the company traversed the stage. Outstanding!"
Dance Magazine July 2005 ( "Tomorrow And The Graham Company" by Doris Hering )
"Beginning to surge through the ranks..."
Student performances: Rollins' and Valencia Community College's dance programs:
Diane Hubbard Burns |
Sentinel Dance Critic
Posted March 20, 2007
The dancers enter backward
with a shuffling stride. Their faces are quiet, but their bodies speak: Torsos
hollowed like taut bows, one hand cocked to their throats, they telegraph
hunger, defeat, forbearance.
This is the beginning of modern dance pioneer Martha Graham's Steps in the
Street, a portion of her Depression-era dance, Chronicle. And this is what made
modern dance groundbreaking in the early 20th century: its break from ballet's
centuries-old conventions to find new movements that would speak a thousand
words without an utterance.
Carrie Ellmore-Tallitsch, a dancer from the Martha Graham Dance Company in New
York, stops the dancers rehearsing in the Rollins College dance studio. She has
taught them the steps, now she is striving to impart something the movement's
spirit.
At 32, Ellmore-Tallitsch is too young to have danced for Graham, who died in
1991. But she is part of the human chain that carries dance's history and
choreography forward from one generation to the next.
"Devastation, homelessness and exile," she says, repeating the subtitle of Steps
in the Street, which evokes images of Depression breadlines, but which Graham
also described it as a portrayal of spiritual devastation wreaked by war.
"Close your eyes and think about those words, devastation, homelessness, exile,"
Ellmore-Tallitsch tells her 13 dancers. "From the inside -- I think you can go a
little more into yourselves."
They return to their places and start again, a heightened intensity in their
focus. "Yes," whispers Ellmore-Tallitsch from the front of the studio.
These dancers are students in Rollins' and Valencia Community College's dance
programs. Graham's Steps in the Street -- along with another short Graham work,
Celebration, that is the antithesis of Steps' somber mood -- will be performed
on dance concerts at both colleges in the next two weeks.
This is the fourth modern master whose work the students have learned over as
many years. First Isadora Duncan, credited as the progenitor of modern dance,
then Alvin Ailey and Jos� Lim�n. In each case, a dancer from the company that
bears the choreographer's name has come to teach the style and steps.
Graham is especially significant because she was first among the modern
innovators to construct and codify a style of moving and a method for teaching
that style. Basing her impetus on the amplified contraction and release of
breath, she developed an entire repertory of movements.
Because Graham provided not only a vision, but a practical means to achieve it,
her style has influenced most modern creators who followed her and is still a
routine part of modern-dance training today.
"They have been studying Graham so long that I think it is really elemental that
they get to do a [Graham] piece," says Lesley Brasseux, director of Valencia
Dance Theatre and a dance instructor at the community college. "It becomes real
to them to utilize it in a performance."
"It's an honor to do pieces that are part of [dance] history," says Nikki Pena,
24, who is jointly enrolled at Valencia Community College and the University of
Central Florida. She said the biggest surprise was that there is so little
acting in Graham's often gripping dances.
"You don't have to do a lot of emoting," Pena says. "If you do the movements
correctly, it just comes out."
Ellmore-Tallitsch, who taught the Graham dances in a hurry-up eight days in
February, says it was the hardest work many of these college-age dancers have
done. Celebration alone � a six-minute marathon of jubilant jumping -- is a
physical test that they had to worked up to.
But the stress and strain is not all physical. "I had them look up those words
'homelessness,' 'exile' and 'devastation,' so that we could use the images they
evoke," she says. The dances "have to go into themselves, not just as dancers,
but as human beings."
She says she hopes that learning dances from Graham's formative period will
empower the dancers to "find ways to express emotion from the inside out" in
whatever kind of dance they do. For the audience, she hopes these dances from
modern's early years will reveal "how timeless these pieces are -- that even
though they're from the '30s era, they are still relevant today."
But for now, it back to the nuts and bolts of pairing movement with music and
teasing out an undercurrent of meaning. The dancers begin again, moving through
a wordless history lesson, a study of meaning in motion.
Diane Hubbard Burns can be reached at dburns@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5459