Love is in the air

A new show from Lisa Hicks and Carol Somers

By Tanya Whiton

Hicks & Somers will be performed March 30, at 7:30 p.m., at the Portland Performing Arts Center, 25A Forest Avenue. Tickets are $12, $10 students and seniors. For reservations call (207) 780-0554.

WHERE ARE THE BALLS?: Lisa Hicks performs with Fritz Grobe and Maria Tzianabos in Love Songs, adding Harold Philbrook for Stop and Go.

A smallish yellow rubber ball rolls across the floor in the PATHS dance classroom, followed by its mates. Sitting cross-legged next to the cushioned mat the balls traverse, I watch them intently. I want to be sure they do what I think they’re supposed to ýo — cross the length of the room and then stop, without bouncing, colliding, or taking any detours. They seem alternately obedient and willful. Dancer/jugglers Lisa Hicks, Fritz Grobe, and Maria Tzianabos watch them, too. They are in mid-rehearsal of a new trio presented by Hicks and New Dance Studio called Love Songs.

Hicks and Grobe began work on Love Songs almost a year ago, with six movements and the notion that they wanted to create a hybrid form combining elements of modern dance and the deft sleight-of-hand juggling work Grobe and his company, blink, are known for. The result is simultaneously serious and comical, elegant and goofy. Set to a series of 18th-century Italian art songs (vocal exercises for opera students) sung by diva Cecilia Bartoli, the five-piece dance moves from bathos (“My love, you are torturing me, please have pity on me . . .”) to athletic humor. In the third section, Grobe deftly tosses four balls and Tzianabos and Hicks intervene, spinning their bodies and then catching the balls as they fall.

What’s amazing about the juxtaposition of Hicks’ understated modern choreography and the three (sometimes four) yellow balls is that their presence leads to movements that would otherwise not occur: manipulating these easily personifiable objects requires balance and a continuous awareness of contact with both the other dancers and the balls themselves. That sense of anticipation and tension you experience watching a juggler is heightened by the fact that while the trio’s movement is shaped — and occasionally constrained — by the balls, that movement is not strictly about graceful handling. It is also dancing, creating patterns in space. “It’s like math, it’s really exacting,” says Hicks. “If you don’t get there [in time to pass, toss, hold, or balance the ball] you’ve missed it.”

Love Songs starts with Hicks dancing solo, a yellow sphere suspended between chin and shoulder. In a sensual flow of movements, both dancer and object set up a vocabulary of emotive motions that are exchanged in the second section for a more light hearted duo by Tzianabos and Grobe. Hicks reenters for the third section, and for a moment, all three dancers prop their bodies at an angle to the floor (a la plank pose or the start of a push up) with balls balanced on the backs of their necks. They move into the fourth and fifth parts of the piece from a lovely, sleepy trio.

My favorite moment was when the heightened awareness of touch inspired by the previous sections was transferred to a human interaction — Hicks and Tzianabos pass Grobe’s pliant body between them with a rolling, caressive motion. The object as agent of communication, barrier to interaction and source of desire is eloquently transposed into a physical rendition of the ways in which people relate to each other. “People identify with the balls,” says Grobe. “We need to be nice to them.”

Love Songsüintroduces a program that will be shared between Hicks and Boston-based choreographer/dancer Carol Somers, the second in an ongoing producing/presenting collaboration between the two. Somers, a muscular, aggressive dancer who last year held a grown man aloft in her arms for a seemingly impossible stretch of time, will be premiering a new solo choreographed from instructions sent to both she and Hicks by New Dance Studio co-founder Daniel McCusker. From a list of nearly 50 directives, each dancer has constructed her own interpretation, a sort of physicalized version of the telephone game.

The other new work from Hicks and company is Stop and Go, a quartet based on an improvisational exercise, which will add the idiosyncratic Harold Philbrook to the Love Songs trio. All four dancers made up a series of spontaneous movements, accumulated enough that felt right, and set the piece in a dance. Even though each of them attempted to remain true to their individual impulses, “just having someone in the room opens up new avenues,” Tzianabos says.

Do they miss the balls? I wonder.

Tanya Whiton can be reached at twhiton@prexar.com.