RACE DANCE

Lisa Race is the artistic director of Race Dance, a project-based company composed of 4 to 6 New England-based performers. Her most recent performance project, Mid-Tide (2018), reflects on memory, family, growing older, and the varied tidal currents we ride through life. Race and long-time partner David Dorfman frame the work with threads of family stories and intimate movement portraits as a trio of silent performers move through a shifting landscape in swirls and rushes of movement. Pathways composed of small pieces of shell are constructed, avoided, fragmented, shattered and ultimately wiped clean by the performers—until the dance refreshes itself. A video monitor seems to float in the space, creating  a door to sense memories, while the original music score creates auras of urgency and contemplation.  The project was created in collaboration with performers Rachel Boggia (CT), David Dorfman (CT), Annie Kloppenberg (ME) and Sasha Peterson (MA), with video by Shawn Hove (CT) and a sound score by Samuel Crawford (NY). Earlier iterations of Mid-Tide as a work in progress were shown at Lion's Jaw Festival, Bates Dance Festival, and Bates College before the premier at Connecticut College in 2018. Race’s earlier work, both solo and company, has been seen at venues in NYC, across the country and abroad.

I’ve been interested in sharing threads of family stories as a way to navigate the inevitable process of growing older. 2019 brings me to my 60th year. I have my 98 year-old mom in the house, along with a 17 year-old son who will leave for college this year. I make choreography that interrogates togetherness, uncertainty, intimacy and memory, and how these qualities dance around and through each other in constituting a life. Movement drives my choreography. It’s where I begin. I like to imagine a body that can reach in all directions – forward, back, up, down – simultaneously. Sometimes the choreography, the movement; is the sole language of the dance. Other times the ideas are augmented with text. I make dances that rely on the people I am collaborating with to bring to life a physicality that is spherical in nature. My current interest is to infuse what begins as an abstract dance with a bit of storytelling. Slivers of narrative are windows through which to view the dance, as well as ways for me to communicate, to remember, to imagine.