Dancing to the rhythm of the body

When trying to characterize her dance style, Maria Gillespie,
choreographer and artistic director for the Oni Dance company and
dance instructor in the world arts and culture department, said,
“I couldn’t say it in one word.”

To an outsider, modern and postmodern dancers may seem to use an
incomprehensible language. Instead of words, they express
themselves through kinetic movement. With a series of pops, spins,
turns, slides, leaps and falls, Gillespie has developed a new dance
vocabulary in which the meaning lies in the actual movements.

Today at noon, the first of three performances comprising the
“In the Garden” series will commence at the Kaufman
Family Garden Theater. The series, presented by the WAC department,
debuted in the fall and has had a positive turnout, reaching
capacity at every performance, according to Lynn Dally, faculty
producer for the series. The series highlights the work of visiting
and adjunct faculty that doesn’t usually get experienced by
the wider UCLA community.

Gillespie and performers from her company, Oni Dance, will
perform two familiar pieces from their repertoire ““
“Visitation” and “Prologue of an Altered
Day” ““ as well as one new piece. Recognized for
developing an original dance vocabulary, Gillespie won the Lester
Horton Award three times and received grants from The Durfee
Foundation and The James Irvine Foundation. With these funds,
Gillespie has worked with the dancers of Oni Dance since before the
company gained its current moniker, which means
“goblin” in Japanese.

“To me the goblin is a symbol of two things: one is a
challenge to transform from negative into positive. Typically the
protagonist would have to transform the oni into good,”
Gillespie said. “I like what that meant for my daily life in
which I’m challenged to make every situation the best it
could possibly be. The other aspect is the idea of honoring the
trickster inside all of us. That’s the side that needs to be
uncovered more.”

Following each performance, a question-and-answer session allows
performers to enter into dialogue with their audiences.
“That’s why doing this show is great. Only rarely does
a dancer and their company get to talk with their audience,”
Gillespie said.

This verbal dialogue may be especially helpful for those
unfamiliar with contemporary modern and postmodern dance.

“Don’t come expecting to see a very specific, very
clear story,” said David Karagianis, senior musician for the
WAC department.

While Gillespie does say her work is abstract, this
doesn’t mean it lacks structure or beauty.

Friday in a Kaufman Hall dance studio, Gillespie and two Oni
Dance performers, Noelli Bordelet and Nguyen Nguyen (a UCLA
microbiology alumnus), practiced the pieces they will perform
Thursday. Gillespie’s instructions to her performers captured
her attitude toward dance.

“I want (Bordelot) to put herself there and you just
facilitate,” Gillespie told Nguyen.

While Gillespie was speaking specifically of their choreographed
movements, this statement also expressed Gillespie’s intent
for the audience to derive meaning from the dance by means of their
own imagination.

Audiences of past “In the Garden” performances have
been mixed, according to Dally, ranging from K-12 school groups and
community members to casual passersby.

Karagianis helpfully described Gillespie’s style for
non-dancers coming to experience Oni Dance performances:
“There are choreographers whose work focuses on communicating
a particular message,” he said. “There are more
traditional choreographers whose overlying goal is to communicate
something about form. There are choreographers who try to interpret
a piece of music. (Gillespie’s) real impulse is movement
itself, the language of movement.”

Gillespie’s style is influenced by release technique,
which has a bit of a ballet aesthetic. “(It’s) a way of
finding the natural way the body moves rather than regurgitating a
shape (of a dance),” she said.

But in order to fully understand the dance language that
Gillespie and Oni Dance express, Dally says it best.

“You have to experience it,” she said.