For the past month, there’s been something strange going on in the Lobero Theatre. Visitors to the venue during the day, including members of the DANCEworks Friday Club, have encountered a very realistic campsite covering most of the stage, including tents, sleeping bags, and a Christmas tree. The most authentic element of the set, however, is also in a way the least natural because the luscious six-inch layer of dark brown earth the whole thing sits on is not dirt but recycled rubber mulch. Three tons of it. The NuPlay product was created to keep kids safe on playgrounds; it has one of the highest shock-absorption ratings of any playground covering. Put down six inches of this stuff, and your hyperactive 4-year-old can safely dive from a height of 16 feet — it’s that resilient.
But this is no playground, or if it is, it’s a playground of a very different sort. Shannon Gillen, the choreographer and founder of Vim Vigor Dance Company, was chosen by Dianne Vapnek for this year’s DANCEworks residency at the Lobero, and she was the one who ordered up this exceptionally fall-friendly and bouncy surface because it’s a great match for the setting of her piece Future/Perfect, which takes place at a campsite in the woods, and because she knew that her dancers would have a ball using it as a trampoline, a safety net, and an all-around aid in defying gravity. The mulch “amplifies the story,” according to Gillen, and although she means that its resemblance to soil makes the wilderness setting look more genuine, she’s also alluding to the outsized daring its forgiving physical properties encourage in the performers. The five young dancers in the company — Laja Field, Martin Durov, Jason Cianciulli, Emma Whiteley, and Rebecca Diab — are leaping, rolling, diving, and sliding around in this stuff in ways that they could not safely do on any other surface.
Vapnek created DANCEworks in 2009 to see what happens when innovative choreographers are given a shot at the one thing they almost never get: a chance to work in rehearsal on the same stage on which they will perform. The vast majority of dances are created and rehearsed in studios that bear little or no relation to the spaces in which they will be shown to an audience. Dancers must imagine what it will be like when they finally get onstage, and choreographers must count steps and measure movements against an image in their heads of where that stage actually begins and ends. Ask any experienced dancer, and they will tell you the same thing: “It’s never the way you pictured it,” and “There are always last-minute adjustments.”