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"Marrow" - Choreographer: Tom Pearson, collaborating artists, Bob Rizzo, Monica Schinn & Anna Shapiro, Island moving Company dancers: Brooke DiFrancesco, Carol Tang, Lauren Difede, Glen Lewis, Jose Edwin Gonzalez, Shane Farrell, Spencer G. Hering. Third Rail Project dancers: Roxanne Kidd, Zoe Schieber.
The interesting thing about the project is that no one was quite sure what the piece was going to look like until this week, when New York choreographer Tom Pearson and local sculptor Bob Rizzo got together with the dancers to rehearse. “It will be a surprise,” said Pearson of the piece, “even to us.”

Open for Dancing
The Steel Yard hosts Island Moving Co.
27 Sims Avenue, Providence RI 02909
Island Moving Co.'s Open for Dancing, presented for the first time at the Steel Yard in Providence, RI. was a site specific interpretive dance created for the Steel Yard's industrial campus. The choreography has been created by Tom Pearson of Third Rail Projects in New York City. Working with Tom will be Providence based artists Bob Rizzo, Monica Shinn, and Anna Shapiro (of The Steel Yard). This team of artists will visually integrate the eclectic industrial arts landscape of the Yard into the performance. 
September 14th & 15th, with performances at 5:00 PM & 6:00 PM
Island Moving Company creates site-specific dance in Providence

September 12, 2013
BY CHANNING GRAY
Journal Arts Writer
cgray@providencejournal.com

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Every couple of years, Newport’s Island Moving Company brings in a choreographer to work with dancers and non-dancers alike, creating a site-specific piece set somewhere in the Newport landscape. The festival, known as Open for Dancing, also involves a guest artist, which in years past have included sculptors, poets and musicians. One year, organizers even invited a chef, who ended up staging a flour fight as part of the performance.

This weekend, Island Moving will be bringing Open for Dancing to Providence for the first time for four free performances at the Steel Yard, the former steel plant on Sims Avenue that is now a thriving artists’ community. Most of the dance will take place outside, on the grounds of the Steel Yard, where there are sculptures, a landscaped courtyard and an imposing gantry system.
The interesting thing about the project is that no one was quite sure what the piece was going to look like until this week, when New York choreographer Tom Pearson and local sculptor Bob Rizzo got together with the dancers to rehearse. “It will be a surprise,” said Pearson of the piece, “even to us.”

Pearson, who is co-founder of New York’s cutting-edge Third Rail Projects, had visited the Steel Yard before rehearsals began and had an idea for some of the moves he wanted to use. But for the most part the piece is being put together between Wednesday and Saturday, when the first two performances take place. The dance moves will be keyed to the sights and sounds of the yard, to people dragging, hammering and bending metal, to the sounds of grinders and the glow of welding torches.

“It all happens in three days,” said Rizzo, who said his job is to work with a couple of artists at the yard and come up with a “bunch of images.”
“There’s very little time to mull it over,” he said. “It’ll be really fresh, fun and interesting.”

The piece, which will last about 25 minutes, involves eight Island Moving members, two dancers from Third Rail, and half-dozen student dancers from the Trinity Academy for the Performing Arts, a charter school in Providence’s West End. In Newport, Island Moving enlists people with little or no dance experience. But for this first trip outside Newport, the company thought it needed “some kind of parameters,” said Island Moving executive director Dominique Alfandre.

Pearson, who said he wanted to take dance out of the theater into the community, does a lot of site-specific work, or dance tailored to a particular location.
“We meet the space halfway,” he said on the phone the other day, as he was leaving for Kazakhstan, where he is staging a piece. “The space becomes a partner. We respond to it physically and culturally.”

For his piece in Providence, Pearson said he hopes to have an artist fabricating something during the performance. He said he wants to “build a vocabulary on the physical actions and properties of metal.” The performances might use the ambient lighting from a welder’s torch, he said, and the sound of metal on metal.
Performances are Saturday and Sunday at 5 and 6 p.m., and they are free. The Steel Yard is at 27 Sims Ave. in Providence.

Meanwhile, Open for Dancing continues Sept. 18-22, when three choreographers create dances for spaces in Newport. Yanira Castro has picked the gutted interior of the Opera House in Washington Square; Deborah Lohse is using the labyrinth outside Salve Regina’s McKillop Library; and John-Mark Owen will create a dance drama on the terraces of Middletown’s Gray Craig estate.
all photos copyright 2013 - Thomas Palmer, Newport , RI
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