Dancing for young audiences
Advice From Experience
Environs
Choreographed by Mark Magruder and performed by Mark and Ella Magruder, this piece premiered in Virginia in 1988. This piece is a sculptural dance in which dancers move in tubes of fabric. Through clever manipulations of shape, the viewer watches a myriad of changing images, all of which are drawn from the world around us. When creating Environs, the shape shifting choreography of Alwin Nikolais inspired Mark. Nikolais, who worked on the microcosmic and sociological level of abstract dances, often encased individual dancers in fabric, Mark wondered what would happen if he put more than one dancer inside, and then encased both dancers inside yet another tube? How would the energy dynamic change? What visual images would viewers perceive? Mark, who previously had danced in two companies founded by Nikolais,' original dancers, Mimi Garrard and Beverley Blossom, pushed the abstract boundaries in Environs. Audiences, young and old, loved this dance and saw among other things, a house, two wise men, a pair of pants and a high-heeled shoe!
Symbiosis
[1984, Missoula Montana] Choreographed by Mark Magruder and performed by Mark and Ella Magruder, this is the signature work of Menagerie Dance Company. Symbiosis explores the ways the inhabitants of the natural world help and support one another. In science, it is the give-and-take association for mutual benefit of two different species. The dancers illustrate this relationship through trust and support in many lifts and balances. To make this dance, Mark studied the symbiotic associations in nature like the wrasse (fish) and the moray eel, the crocodile and the crocodile bird, and the clownfish and the sea anemone, all of whom share inter-species dependence. The human bodies in this work make many symmetrical and asymmetrical shapes that support one another in precarious and risky ways. Both dancers will fall without the help and/or support of the other. Pilobolus in the late 1970's led the way in the evolution of gender neutral lifts and balances in modern dance, and Mark explored the new contact possibilities early in his university studies at the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana. Menagerie's Symbiosis is a kinetic symbol of human and animal interdependence. Often comic and wildly popular with audiences, the dance stayed in the repertory of Menagerie for more than 15 years.
