Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre dancers Shelby Moran Amarantos and Jesse Hoisington with CRDT Jazz Band in “Identity City”/Photo: Fernando Rodriguez Photography
Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre’s Instagram feed has for several weeks featured posts welcoming back company members and collaborators, one glowing headshot at a time. This upbeat roll call of dancers and musicians also feels like a proxy greeting to audience members who will be welcomed to the Epiphany Center for the Arts on April 22 for the company’s season kickoff—one of the first live, in-person dance performances under a roof in the city in more than thirteen months. Seating is, of course, limited and the performance will be livestreamed, but fifty souls will share the energized space with Cerqua Rivera’s dancers and live jazz band. The prospect is positively intoxicating.
The program features a restaging of “Mood Swing,” a suite of duets created last year in response to the pandemic and to social justice movements, along with two of Cerqua Rivera’s longterm, iterative projects: “Soul Remedy” by choreographer Monique Haley and jazz composer Pharez Whitted, a two-year exploration of Black American cultural influence and the “Aesthetic of the Cool”; and “Identity City,” co-founder and artistic director Wilfredo Rivera’s four-year project about non-binary, trans and gender-queer experiences and traditions that are shifting with a new generation.
Choreographer Stephanie Martinez revisits “Shiver,” a dance she created for Cerqua Rivera in October of 2016 (what seems like forever ago). “In the original version. I was interested in looking at the experience of transformation,” Martinez says in an interview. “It deals with self-love and acceptance, but what does that look like when dealing with addiction? There’s a lot of despair, there’s redemption and, hopefully at the end, there’s acceptance. You see a person in their most vulnerable state.”
Vulnerability, despair and redemption are timeless themes but particularly of the moment for a populace worn by isolation, political divisiveness and relentless, heartbreaking news of mass shootings and police violence. Martinez sees the restaging as a rare opportunity to dig deeper. “It’s such a highly emotional subject and there are so many more layers of intimacy to dive into,” she says. “There are different bodies in the room with different things to access physically, and they add their own point of view and experience. I think it’s important when you revisit a work to give the dancers agency, especially when the subject matter is so personal.”
This staging of “Shiver” will include a new score by co-founder Joe Cerqua. “This particular set of music is vastly different in its set of rhythms and layering of sound—it’s quite intricate,” Martinez says. “My work has a lot of masculine and feminine qualities and I wanted that reflected in the score. I want a little bit of danger in the score. What does that feel like? When someone is in danger, and when they’re not.”
Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre Season Kickoff, livestreamed and with limited seating at Epiphany Center for the Arts, 201 South Ashland, (312)421-4600. Thursday, April 22, 7pm. Tickets $19.75-$40, cerquarivera.org.
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