Contemporary Dance/Fort Worth to close festival with Choreographers Showcase

A few years ago, Kerry Kreiman, co-founder of Contemporary Dance/Fort Worth, came up with a new concept for the company, introducing a “season on wheels.”

Rather than produce a traditional spring and fall concert on a stage at a space like the Fort Worth Community Arts Center, the company would focus efforts on taking dance out to the community.

“Since the company started, we’ve been doing work throughout the Metroplex,” she says, “in schools, museums, shopping malls, but we really wanted to do more of that.

For instance, in 2014, the group produced traveling, site-specific work on the lawn of the Kimbell Art Museum and participated in the national Unsilent Night event. And for the annual Modern Dance Festival at the Modern, now in its 12th year, that has always been the case.

The festival opened July 10 with “Dance Unplugged,” in which local and regional companies and dancers performed short works, and/or engaged in structured improvisation. At the first installment, not only were kids encouraged to participate in a number of the events, including “Follow the Leader,” but the final group to perform, Collective Force Dance Company, featured several dancers with babies strapped to their torsos in “Seeds of Joy.” Older children danced with the adults in a circle.

The festival wraps up this week with its annual “CD/FW Dance Exchange: A Choreographers Showcase,” with free performances Thursday and Friday.

“The showcase is an avenue for the community to experience a variety of dances,” Kreiman says. “A lot of people who come to the free showcases might not be familiar with modern/contemporary dance, but they will see them. Or they’ll hear different kinds of music — some live, and a lot of different elements.”

This year, that includes performances by Dallas companies Beckles Dancing Company, DGDG (Danielle Georgiou Dance Group) and Muscle Memory Dance Theatre. Individual choreographers/dancers from Denton, Dallas, Fort Worth and the Colony will create work. Also, longtime CD/FW dancer Tina Mullone, based in Monroe, La., will premiere a collaboration called In Convenience with composer Mel Mobley.

CD/FW will premiere A History of Modern Dance (abridged), which will humorously track the history of the style of dance, from Isadora Duncan to Martha Graham to Twyla Tharp and beyond, to which the company has devoted its 22 years.

One work to watch for is Amy L. Sleigh’s Vernacular Architecture, in which she dances with a GoPro camera strapped to her waist, documenting what the dancer sees in performance. Audiences will be able to view it online, at www.cdfw.org, after the performances.

“The audience looking at it will just see what the camera strapped to her body took video of, so it’ll be the audience, the building, the floor, outside,” Kreiman says. “It will be recording the dancer’s point of view.

“When you’re going up and down and turning, you’ve got stage lights blaring at you at different points; you have to keep your orientation in the space. It gives the audience a bit of the dancer experience.”

Like CD/FW’s mission, this idea has wheels.

This story was originally published July 23, 2015 at 3:44 PM with the headline "Contemporary Dance/Fort Worth to close festival with Choreographers Showcase."