Fowler Out Loud series ‘Dancing in Your Living Room’ plans to change dynamic between performers and audience

The small, arched courtyard at the center of the Fowler Museum is not your typical living room.

It’s not your typical dance studio, either, but that doesn’t worry first-year dance and choreography graduate student Sarah Leddy, who will be presenting the next installment in the Fowler Out Loud series, “Dancing in Your Living Room,” Thursday, Nov. 4 at 6 p.m.

Featuring the contemporary dance of Leddy and her collaborator Lailye Weidman, who graduated from the dance and choreography program at UCLA last June, the performance will play with the dynamic between audience and performer by bringing dance into casual setting.

“A lot of times I think people feel alienated by dance … so I’m thinking about the immediacy of being close enough to touch a performer or audience member and how that might change people’s perception of the dancing,” Leddy said.

The Fowler courtyard is an unconventional venue for dance theater ““ intimate and open to the evening air, Christmas lights dot the periphery, reflecting the quiet glow of a stone fountain at the center.

While Leddy and Weidman have seen their work in more traditional theaters and dance studios, this event will be an opportunity for the dancers to let their choreography breathe in a new context.

“There’s a different quality to a performance when it’s that close up, and I think it takes people into a dream-like environment that reimagines space and time,” Leddy said.

Sara Stranovsky, the coordinator of Fowler Out Loud, said that it has been interesting to watch Leddy and Weidman play with the environment at Fowler.

“There’s something about being in an outside space as well that makes it feel casual in a way that’s about sharing something and not just about performing at someone,” Stranovsky said.

One of the elements that unites Leddy and Weidman’s work is an interest in the postmodern tradition of dance and theater.

While Leddy was originally trained in modern dance, her interest in postmodern dance theater developed after she saw other dancers experimenting with less formal dance structures such as improvisation.

Leddy and Weidman will spend part of the evening working with dance scores, an improvisational structure used to lead the artists in an organized but unchoreographed performance. The performers will be like actors, with rules to follow but ultimately unaware of the fate of the show.

“There are these elements of risk and the unknown. What will happen?” Weidman said. “Will there be someone in the way?”
For Weidman, that possibility is by no means unlikely. The evening will also include special guests, a range of students including opera singers, violinists and others involved in the arts at UCLA.

According to Sara Stranovsky, the variety of forms Leddy and Weidman are layering adds an element of mystery.

“It’s going to be an exciting night for dance at the Fowler,” Stranovsky said. “They’re going to make the audience appreciate movement in space they might not have experienced before.”