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Soaring to New Heights: Maryland Dance Company Lifts its Work Off the Stage, Literally
Martinsburg Journal, January 2005, by Lisa Cliff

SHEPHERDSTOWN - Therese Keegan didn't want to run away and join the circus. She just wanted to dance like she had. So the Knoxville, Maryland dancer learned how to use the trapeze to take her ballet to new heights, forming the dance company Updraft: A Conspiracy of Movement.

So the Knoxville, Maryland dancer learned how to use the trapeze to take her ballet to new heights, forming the dance company Updraft: A Conspiracy of Movement. The company will stage a benefit preview of their new performance, "Suite Earth," at the Shepherdstown Train Station Sunday in preparation for its debut at the Baltimore Theatre Project on Feb. 22 and 23. Pops Walker, the Luray, Virginia guitarist who has made a name for himself playing bottleneck slide and acoustic blues,will join in Sunday.

Working with a changing cast of dancers, Updraft combines aerial, circuslike movements with modern dance, utilizing a low-flying trapeze and aerial fabrics to lift the dancers off the stage periodically. Keegan, the company's artistic director and founder,met with a dancer friend who happened to be taking a trapeze class. Keegan says she was encouraged to give aerial dance a try and even join a company in Baltimore, Air Dance Bernasconi. She also trained in Vermont with two women involved with probably the most famous aerial group, Cirque du Soleil. It wasn't long before Keegan added a studio to her home for the aerial work and formed Updraft. "Not only to work closer to home," she says, "but to work with people from this area."

Two of those people are Lynda Bell, a musician who has collaborated with her band to create the music for "Suite Earth," and Martinsburg dancer Michele Hartley, Updraft company manager who met Keegan in a local dance class. After seeing Keegan perform aerial dance work in her Slippery Slope studio about a year ago, she knew she, too, wanted to take to the air. "It was meaningful, beautiful, creative and artistic. It really feels much different than it looks," Hartley says before the table of three women steals knowing glances at each other and erupts laughter. "It looks really fun and it is really fun. But it's also really hard," Keegan says. "It looks carefree ... but it can be painful."

Hartley says aerial dance hasn't injured her but does require strength, flexibility and a certain amount of, well, risk-taking. After all, she says, you can float about 20 feet above the floor and once there must realize that you will be using your body in ways you might not be used to: There is an unpredictability that the dancer must be prepared for when using an aerial apparatus, Keegan adds.

"It requires a different kind of kinesthetic awareness. You are using your balance differently, using the momentum of movement and your weight differently," Keegan says. The trapeze the company uses isn't like a circus trapeze that swings back and forth connected by two ropes. Aerial dance uses a trapeze that is suspended by a single strand, so that it swings and spins, allowing for more variation of movement, Keegan says. "It literally opens up a whole other plane," Hartley says of aerial dance.

And because the fabrics and trapeze allow so much spontaneity, choreography of aerial dance is often split between planned and improvised moves, Keegan says. She uses a video camera to capture movements during practice in order to help with choreography. All of the dancers, in this way, have a hand in creating this very collaborative dance.

"Suite Earth," Keegan says, "is more than just tricks and 'Look what we can do.'" It is more dance and expression than stunt. That's where Updraft differs from a troupe, like Cirque du Soleil, or from circus acrobats. A series of dance vignettes, "Suite Earth" came to fruition after a happenstance encounter Keegan had with the Alice Walker's "Sent by Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon'' (Seven Stories Press, 2001).

After sharing her thoughts about Walker 's short book with friends and family, Keegan says the text formed many visual images in her head. She could envision what Walker was trying to say as a piece of dance work and theater. In it, Keegan says she saw the kind of violence that comes through the quiet suffering of poverty, malnutrition and economic deprivation. Unlike what the media portrays, Keegan says there are no simple villains and demons to blame. Those epiphanies, she says, form the foundation of "Suite Earth."

The piece, called "Sadie Hussein's Lament," is powerful, says Bell , who watched video of Updraft rehearsals in order to match an original composition to the dance. Bell 's band, Mason, Bell , Helmick and Lay, will perform Sunday with Updraft for the "Suite Earth" preview. After seeing two of the dancers perform as a mother and her dying child, Bell says she took a walk in the woods to think of how a mother would comfort a child. A lullaby came to mind, so Bell says she just sat down and started humming a beautiful tune. The composition, in its minor key, came from there. Later, the piece arches out into a powerful symphony with full, dramatic sound as Death appears to claim its victims, Bell says.

Keegan says she has enjoyed the collaborative process of "Suite Earth." "The music is influenced by dance and the dance by music. To be able to have music that's based on the movement is fantastic," she says.

Bell says the band is versatile enough to handle the task, proficient in everything from jazz to rock. '"Dogs of War' is basically thrash metal,'' Bell says of the fourth piece in the "Suite Earth" collection. The whole performance ends with "Prescription for Earth," a 15-minute piece that includes two giant puppets a human, operated by one person, and a bird, operated by four. Keegan hopes to have the puppets available for the Train Station performance but will not be able to hook up aerial apparatus, though the company will show video footage of its work.

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