Kelley Donovan, left, Choreographer
Photo by Michael Hamilton.
Sitting on the floor crosslegged at Green Street Studios in Cambridge, surrounded by stacks of spotlights and piles of cabling, Kelley Donovan conveys both strength and serenity. She's been rehearsing her dancers all afternoon, but she's still lucid when it comes to discussing her emphatic dances, which she says, "investigate community, spirituality and transformation."
Her all-female company, Kelley Donovan and Dancers, has been gaining steady momentum since it was founded in Boston six years ago. The program tonight and tomorrow evening at Green Street Studios, titled "Things That Go Unsaid," features two premieres and three dances from Donovan's ever-growing repertory.
At 37, Donovan has paid her dues as a dancer and choreographer, experience that makes her one of the area's hottest emerging talents.
Seen in rehearsal, Donovan's varied dances display at least one common denominator - an evident structure. Maybe that's because she has studied with some of the finest teachers, including Boston-based choreographers Brian Crabtree and Daniel McCusker, and internationally known figures such as Mark Morris, Bessie Sch�nberg, and Deborah Jowitt.
The structures of here own dances don't derive from the music, though, since she favors electronic sound montages over classical scores. Rather, they have a kind of intrinsic integrity that results from a collaborative process.
"I learned from Mark Morris that you have to do things quickly," said Donovan. Here in Cambridge, he said to us, "You have as long as it takes me to drink a beer at Green St. Grill to make a section of movement." So we had to think structurally instead of taking every little moment and refining it.
"Also, I learned from him to keep every dancer busy all the time in rehearsals. That way the energy doesn't drop and the dancers don't feel their time is being wasted, " she said.
Donovan is one of a number of lesbian choreographers working in the area, though she is the only lesbian in her all-female company. She says her dances "show women outside of their standard roles, being more active, more aggressive but in a positive, affirming way."
"In a women's company, there are often many sensual moments together on stage, and you can't get away from what that implies. Most of our pieces, though, could be danced by two men, two women, whatever."
"I'm more interested in exploring the energy between two people," Donovan said. "The lesbian approach is definitely there, but it's not conscious. I only started dating women about five years ago, so I have this whole prior period of choreographing where I wasn't thinking about that at all.
Maybe it's freed me up to be less focused on my body now, so that I can get to more of an internal impulse in the dancing. That's one thing that has really changed for me."
Spirituality is also a major theme in her work. "Conversation Out of Silence" is inspired by images of Quakers, juxtaposing one figure against six others who explore off-balance motion.
And her "No Such Thing As a True Story" takes its inspiration from a recent book by Pema Ch�dr�n, the great American Buddhist practitioner and teacher.
Uncertainty interests me, and Pema Ch�dr�n's book "Comfortable With Uncertainty" came out when I was making this dance. I gave the dancers lots of images around groundlessness, not knowing where you're going. They came up with many phrases around that, I added things, and I would say that this is our most collaborative piece to date. Structurally, dancers keep coming and going, so there is the constant sense of change. I added the passage from the book about having one's own particular story, being attached to that, and then being able to let go of it.
'Things That Go Unsaid,' by Kelley Donovan and Dancers, at Green Street Studios, 185 Green Street, Cambridge, tonight and tomorrow at 8pm tickets $12/$15; call 617.864.3191.
A Review of "Things That Go Unsaid"