BY MICHAEL GLUK

In print | Published February 26, 2009

This Friday, Swarthmore’s Lang Performing Arts center will host “newyou,” a theatrical dance piece from acclaimed choreographer Johannes Wieland. The opportunity to host such an event is a rare one; Wieland runs his own self-titled dance company based in New York and Germany, a company that boasts acclaim from “The New York Times” and “Time Out New York.”

“Newyou,” the press release reads, “premiered in June of 2008, and subsequently toured through Europe.” The performance is a multimedia, multi-genre piece, integrating dance with dramatic theater and video art. Isadora Wolfe, a founding member of the Johannes Wieland company and a performer in “newyou,” said, “It’s dance theater. It incorporates a lot of difficult, technical dancing with a good amount of speaking.” When asked why she chose to bring the Johannes Wieland dance company to Swarthmore, Kathy Watts, who submitted the Cooper Funds proposal for the event, said, “I have seen a couple other works of the company’s, and he’s just very innovative. This piece is a multimedia performance, and he’s remarkable at using all aspects of theater and performance art. He’s innovative about how he expresses the ideas of dance. I find his work very intriguing.”

Particularly interesting about this piece is how the choreography came together. Wolfe said that dancers were given specific tasks — such as producing movement material of a specific quality or improvising movemen — to complete on video. Wieland would later “review the videos and decide which movements he wanted to keep, then he would modify the order and refine the movements until [he developed] the structure he desired.” Such a method gives the dancers incredible responsibility and creativity in developing the choreography that makes up the performance. “[Wieland] doesn’t ever demonstrate, which is amazing,” Wolfe said. “He never shows you what he wants, which means you always have to feel it from within yourself or with other dancers.”

The piece concerns itself chiefly with issues of self-perception and self-definition, exploring issues of truth versus illusion and one’s self through one’s own eyes versus through those of society as they pertain to “the ideas we have about what it means to be happy,” said Liza Clark, a key player in bringing the performance to Swarthmore.

The gravity of the piece also posed special challenges for its performers. Wolfe said, “Because the work is somewhat dark and psychological, that was the world we were creating and living in every day during rehearsal.” The emotional demands this choreography took on the players, however, paid off in the final product. Wolfe said, “In the end, when you have anything so fraught with struggle, it makes the piece all that much more rich, because as a dancer, there’s a history behind the movement you do.”

Given the importance of each of the five performers to the piece and the collaboration between choreographer and performers, Watts grew especially enthusiastic about presenting this particular piece, “newyou,” to the Swarthmore community. Watts said that the result of such collaboration is “a unified team in which no single performer steals the show. [It] brings to mind student cooperation, and I think it’s reflective of how professors work with students.”

The production will run at the Pearson Hall Theater on Feb. 27, at 8 p.m. For Swarthmore students and faculty, it should be exciting to witness this up-and-coming company navigate the mysteries of the human psyche as deftly as its dancers do the stage.

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