Members and alumni of Grand Valley State University’s Dance Company will team up with dancers from the Grand Rapids community in this year’s performance of Trip the Light: Mythical on May 11 at the Wealthy Theatre.

After starting in 2010, Trip the Light has grown into a collaboration of sorts where local musicians and choreographers come together to create unique pieces of art. When Director Amy Wilson first created the show, musicians would pre-record the music. Now they invest more time and energy to produce an original piece to go along with the choreographer’s dance.

“I don’t know of any other event in Grand Rapids that creates the amount of original content with the intensity that Trip the Light does,” Wilson said. “It’s all about artists who have an incredible amount of passion for what they do, coming together to create something not only beautiful, but thought provoking. It’s all about the weight of the collaboration.”

The show will combine a variety of musical genres, such as rock, folk, African, blues and Arabic influences.

Wilson is occasionally an adjunct professor in the dance department at GVSU, which is how she became friends with Shawn Bible, head of GVSU’s dance department, who is choreographing the opening number for the show called Scapegoat.

Bible’s dance is comprised of seven female dancers, one of which is a dance colleague of his from GVSU, Carrie Brueck.

When it comes to planning out routines, Bible usually has phrases ready and ideas in place before he even meets with the dancers. This time he decided to wait until he went to rehearsal and got a feel for how the dancers worked collectively before he started putting the piece together.

“I started making phrase work on them and I would just pick and choose things I liked and things I didn’t and we started to develop a piece out of that,” Bible said. “A story sort of immerged throughout the process and that’s how the title became Scapegoat.”

The idea for Scapegoat began as sort of a joke about what the dancers were going to wear and grew into a new inventive dance piece.

“’I said…‘I’d like you to wear dresses like you’re a girl that lives in the mountain and you have a pet goat.’ It was just a joke, but it ended up that we made the idea around being mountain women who have pet goats,” Bible said.

Every dance that Bible choreographs is different from the next. For this piece, he was paired with an accordion player and they bounced ideas off of each other.

“I like [my process] to be different every time I do things,” Bible said. “I love using technology, but for this one I just striped it all back and there is no technology at all…the dancers are standing on chairs and there’s the live accordion player, so it’s pretty bare boned.”

Bible said the show is innovative because it is a really different creative process than most of them were used to.

“You have choreographers and musicians who have never worked together before, who don’t know each other and don’t necessarily know each other’s work, and then you bring the two together and they create a piece that is a one of a kind piece of art,” Bible said.

The one-night only show is both ephemeral and one that can only be truly experienced from the audience.

“Everything happens in real time,” Wilson said. “There is a huge amount of risk involved in producing an event like this, its electric, you can feel it in the air. Everybody that is there is a part of what’s happening on stage in terms of energy, it’s not a production that’s canned or prefabricated. It is an experience.”

Tickets for the 8 p.m. show are on sale at www.wealthytheatre.org/trip and more information can be found on www.danceintheannex.com.
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