David Parsons recalls the feeling of sitting in New York’s Town Hall, seeing
the fusion of opera and rock music performed by the East Village Opera Company,
and suddenly feeling electrified by a form of music he’d never much connected
with.
“They blew me away,” the Parsons Dance founder/ choreographer says.
“I was totally into their reincarnation of this music, a lot of which is 300
years old. It sounded so fresh, I thought, man, this is something I would like
to reintroduce to young people and old people alike, because these are the
classic melodies in our society.”
The result, “Remember Me,” is a
multimedia spectacle combining dance, aerial work, digital projections,
intensive lighting design and East Village Opera’s iconoclastic take on Verdi,
Puccini, Mozart and Schubert. Thirteen pieces are combined to portray a classic
love triangle with a decidedly modern bent.
“It’s a real emotional
journey for the audience, this contemporary vocabulary with these older songs,”
Parsons says. “It’s about letting people really feel the emotion of these
characters. I wanted people to know exactly what was going on, not to have big
question marks in front of their faces like you do at a lot of dance
theater.”
Popular
demand
Opening the evening will be Parsons’ classic
“Caught,” which uses strobe lighting to catch isolated moments in time, creating
the illusion of dancers flying and levitating. Created in 1982, the work has
become the company’s signature. “People get upset if they don’t see it,” Parsons
says, likening it to a band’s biggest hit. “There’s not a lot of contemporary
dance companies that have those kinds of pieces in their repertoire, so I think
of it as a gift that I made it.”
