Sunday March 22, 2009 - Rob and I went to the premiere screening of the film A Year With TAKE Dance. The theatre was packed with friends and fans of Takehiro Ueyama, the former Paul Taylor dancer who founded his own troupe in 2004: TAKE Dance. The film was created by Damian Eckstein.
I fell for Take when I saw him dancing with the Taylor Company at Jacob's Pillow in the 1990s. Then I sort of lost track of him (and of non-balletic dance in general) until last year when Sophie Bromberg alerted me to the fact that Take now had his own troupe. Long story short: I was invited to a TAKE Dance rehearsal which was a revelatory experience for me; there I fell for Take the Choreographer and for his Company of dancers.
Above, Jill Echo and Take in a still from the film which follows the fledgling Company over the course of a year and will be of interest whether you are a devotee of Take, or are simply fascinated by the daily routine of people who dance or - like me - didn't realize until too late that dancing was supposed to be what you were doing with your life. The film mixes rehearsal and performance footage with interviews and we see most of the current dancers in Take's Company plus some who have since moved into other career phases - people I loved at first sight, like Elise Drew and Kate Hirstein.
The current dancers (including Amy Young and John Eirich, above) were all on hand for the screening tonight; on Thursday at their rehearsal event at the Ailey Studios, some of them expressed concerns about seeing themselves on the big screen but of course they all looked teriffic. There were enjoyable scenes of camaraderie, the dancers doing impressions of Take (John Eirich nailed it), eating, talking about their day jobs, rehearsing. But the best moments were the filmed excerpts from Take's works.
The evening did not begin smoothly as the theatre personnel seemed very disorganized, and they had scheduled two 'events' at the same time in limited lobby space. We met Take and some of the dancers and also Ariel and Tonya; Taylor and Sophie arrived later. Unfortunately the dry air in the screening room gave me a sinus headache and at the end I really needed to get out into the fresh air and so missed the chance to talk to everyone. Taylor and I appeared very briefly in the film!
Prior to the Take film (and before the headache set in) we watched a very moving brief film called NO SE which juxtaposed shadowy black-and-white footage of dancers in a New York City studio with scenes depicting the last day in the life of a South African woman dying of AIDS. A quick Google search gave me no information on the film but I plan to dig deeper.
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