Over the past two years we have performed LIAISONS in 22 living rooms in New York and New Jersey as well as 3 living rooms in Berlin, Germany. It has been an amazing, fun, challenging experience.
The next phase for LIAISONS is to share the dance with senior centers and nursing homes. We have connected with Hospital Audiences and been awarded a grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council to bring LIAISONS to senior centers and nursing homes.
Through Hospital Audiences we have performed LIAISONS twice at Goddard Senior Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
The performance space at Goddard also functions as the cafeteria and on the last Friday of every month about 150 to 200 seniors gather for a free meal and performance. On last Fridays, anyone with a birthday that month can sit at the tables, decorated with balloons, and arranged in an L-shape in the middle of the dance floor. Birthday seniors don’t have to wait in the lunch line. Instead they are served food at the birthday tables.
I inquired about moving the tables from the middle of the dance floor, and was emphatically told that we could not move them as it is illegal to ask seniors to lift anything and the custodian was busy in another part of the building. So we asked the seniors to turn their chairs to face the dance floor and incorporated them and the balloons into the piece.
I had never performed at a senior center before and was anticipating a somber, depressing and emotionally draining experience. Instead the seniors were amazing and I had a BLAST. One woman (who apparently was a former dancer) clapped vigorously at every lift and made the entire room clap with her. When Jeffrey Peterson was stripped to his underwear one old lady bemoaned the fact that she had left her camera at home. Another man kept a hilarious commentary going throughout the dance and when Jeffrey (wearing only undies) did a leap that landed in front of a rather large elderly woman, the man declared, - "Ohhh No. She's too big for you." The seniors sang along with the music (to one of the dancer’s surprise as he didn’t realize Mantovani’s music had lyrics…) and were energizing, incredibly appreciative and fun!
The second LIAISONS performance at Goddard Senior Center with the new cast (Ben Asriel, Melissa Guerrero, Solomon Bafana Matea and Maxx Passion) was going wonderfully, until towards the end when the staff started serving ice cream and cake. The ending of LIAISONS purposefully disintegrates into real time, as I am interested in deconstructing the preciousness and formality of concert dance. However with the arrival of desert the senior’s attention truly deconstructed and disintegrated. I have learnt that ice cream and cake (like children and animals on stage) will pull focus, and to ask a center if they have an agenda so we can incorporate it into the dance as opposed to being upstaged by it.
Erika Teutssch (the Director of Senior Services at Goddard) sent a letter to Hospital Audiences which they forwarded to us:
"What a wonderful surprise the Delirious Dance Company was that you sent to us to help celebrate our birthday party last Friday. The seniors (and our staff) thoroughly enjoyed Edisa Weeks' original and occasionally risque creation and the dancers were a total delight. There were about 125 persons in the audience - and not a single person left until the performance was over."
I'm looking forward to more performances!
Deliriously,
Edisa
