Podcast: Choreographer Brenda Way on the Making of In the Memory of the Forest
Choreographer Brenda Way discusses the synthesis of her latest project, In the Memory of the Forest, for her company, ODC/Dance. In the Memory of the Forest is a collaborative effort with the usual suspects – lighting designer, composer, dancers – but the driving catalyst for the work was a story rooted in the lore of the choreographer’s own family. Decades before they had met, Way’s mother-in-law, Iza Erlich, made an audacious journey on foot across Eastern Europe.
In 1941, Erlich was a teenager living in Warsaw, Poland, but escaped the war-torn country and trekked through Germany to Russia, in a quest to find a man (who would later become her husband) who had fled Poland with his family months earlier. Erlich recorded the details of her journey on four audiotapes and passed them on to the choreographer because she had always felt dance was the best form to communicate her story. Way kept the tapes in her desk for nearly two decades.
Enter video artists David and Hi-Jin Hodge. They had an intriguing visual idea that they felt “somehow related to mortality” and sent it to Way. It struck her as the perfect vehicle to finally tell her mother-in-law’s story “because it was about transcendence” Way said, and she set to work.
She brought her company to White Oak Plantation – the Barishnikov studio in Florida – for a residency and filmed the visual components in collaboration with the video artists. She retained Elaine Buckholtz, who had previously worked with Merce Cunningham and Meredith Monk, for visual direction and lighting design and commissioned Jay Cloidt to write a score that used excerpts from Erlich’s tapes.
In the Memory of the Forest premieres today at ODC/Dance Downtown, ODC’S annual spring season in San Francisco.
ODC/Dance Downtown runs March 12-29 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Novellus Theater, 700 Howard St., in San Francisco.
Tickets: 415-978-ARTS (2787), www.ybca.org or www.odcdance.org
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