As Motion Pacific evolves, its new season of dance blurs the line between audience and performer
Five years ago, Abra Allan was doing everything at Motion Pacific from taking out the trash to helping teach dance classes and scheduling shows. Today, as a board member and instructor, she has shaped the dance studio into something that will soon take an entirely new form.
“We just filed our 1023 form with the IRS, we are looking to be a not-for-profit arts organization by this spring,” says Allan.
Having established the group’s board of directors, classes for youth and adults, and scholarship programs, becoming a nonprofit was a natural next step to become more fully engaged with the community, says Allan.
“Santa Cruz is a really participatory community, people want to be involved,” she says. “Everybody wants to be a dancer, everybody wants to be an artist, everybody wants to be a musician—and everybody is.”
The division between performer and audience will be blurred throughout Motion’s upcoming season, which begins Oct. 23; for a preview, we spoke to the directors and choreographers behind each show. All performances are at the Motion Pacific studio, 131 Front St. in Santa Cruz.
Max10
As the name suggests, this is an uncurated performance lab where a maximum of 10 performers get 10 minutes to showcase any kind of work, be it dance, spoken word, comedy or theater. What began as the brainchild of local dance professor, director and choreographer Cid Pearlman is meant to embolden both sides of the artistic conversation.
“We wanted a creative space for people to practice performing, and build a community to support it through critique,” says Pearlman.
Everyone at Max10 has a role to play: the artist to perform and the audience to critique. “What this work is really great for is either established artists showing new work that is outside their genre and comfort zone, or just brand new artists that are really getting their performance legs and want to show a snippet of work,” says Allan.
8 p.m. on Oct. 23, $5.
Some Bodies Confessional
Pearl Marill’s Some Bodies Confessional is an exploration of human nature. Her ensemble feeds off the audience’s energy by reading anonymous confessions.
“I’ve always been really interested in what do people do when they’re at home, when they’re by themselves,” she says. The confessions create an aura of hidden excitement, she says, as they weave together the worlds of parody and humor that are at the core of the show.
Playing upon pop culture, Marill calls one of her pieces a “pop satire, quirky over-the-top modern dance on a beach towel with books and a really bad magic show.” It’s deadpan comedy through dance, she says. “I think its important to discuss really important heavy topics, and also important to be able to take a journey and escape some of that sometimes,” she says. Marill’s work is also not all about the perfected line and the precise ideal. One of her dancers has no formal training at all, she says, while others have years of technical experience; “You don’t all have to be cookie cutter dancers,” she says “We’re all learning from each other and our skills.” 8 p.m., Oct. 25, $14-$18.
Bad Here Day
The final installment of Fog Beast’s four-part dance exploration Bad Here Day continues to unpack what it means to be “here.” Co-director Melecio Estrella explains that the show is a mixture of everything that theatrical experimentation has to offer—the vocal and the physical. We live in a world that is constantly pulling us one way or another with a multitude of distractions, he says. That’s what their company’s work is all about.
“How does your history play into what’s going on right now? It’s very much about being a person, so the physicality of that includes everyday movement,” says Estrella. He says he and co-director Andrew Ward seek to learn from their dancers as much as their dancers learn from them in order to create something that is nuanced and relatable.
8 p.m., Nov. 7, $14-$18
Stockings: A Holiday Cabaret
Holiday spirit doesn’t always have to be wholesome, as the annual Holiday Cabaret has proven year after year, says Motion house choreographer and dance instructor Melissa Wiley.
“You’ve got humor, you’ve got sexiness, incredible talent, and it all comes together for this super raucous, debaucherous, ridiculously good time,” she says.
But it’s not just blushingly good fun; there’s some charitable holiday cheer behind the whole event, as ticket sales fund the studio’s scholarship program.
“We want to make it possible for anybody who wants to dance to have an opportunity to dance,” says Wiley. One flowing collaborative effort, the cabaret show hosts Marty O’Reilly & the Old Soul Orchestra in harmony with dancers and aerial performers that transform the Motion Pacific space into a “Roaring ’20s”-themed lair of somewhat scandalous sentiment. 8 p.m., Dec. 18-20, $25. PHOTO: MOTION PACIFIC
