“Composer [Paul Rivera] will perform with us on stilts, singing and playing guitar, along with a chamber ensemble of Harvard student musicians. Harvard alum[na] and aerial silk artist Marin Orlosky will be suspended eight feet in the air as dancers, a stilt-walker, and musicians perform on the stage below her,” Walker elaborates.

Recent Harvard graduates Larissa D. Koch ’08 and Claudia F. Schreier ’09, both of whom are currently pursuing careers as professional choreographers, are returning to stage two pieces for “Momentum.” Schreier’s work will feature live piano accompaniment and inventive costuming. In a similarly unique fashion, Koch—who performed with HBC throughout her undergraduate career and currently directs her own dance company—has collaborated with electroacoustic specialist and Harvard Music Professor Hans Tutschku to create a piece tailored to Tutschku’s original, HBC-commissioned score.

“I was incredibly lucky to be paired with [Tutschku],” Koch says. “He’s a really responsive composer, so I wasn’t just creating a dance to music that already existed.”

“We made this together, and we got to have an artistic dialogue. That is not something you get every day.”

STEPPING IT UP

Professional work will share the Mainstage with student choreography in “Momentum”, which will feature original pieces by Ricky D. Kuperman ’11, Nina K. Stoller-Lindsey ’10, and Patrick H. Quinn ’10.

Quinn, a computer science concentrator, reiterates the multidisciplinary dimension of the show by melding technology with dance. His piece will employ a video installation onstage to complement the energetic movements of his dancers.

Kuperman’s piece “tells the story of a sculptor whose creations betray him and the frustrations that accompany... the [realization] that the statues’ allegiances don’t lie where he thought they did.”

“As a choreographer, [I] want to walk a fine line between mime and dance,” Kuperman says, describing his approach to staging a narrative dance. “I find myself abstracting many of these plot points.”

“It’s amazing how explicit you need to be for an audience to catch on, but I [still] think it’s refreshing to have a story,” the Psychology concentrator continues, expressing hope that the combination of his choreography, complex lighting effects, set design, and use of props will help the audience bridge the gap between movement and its underlying chronicle.

Stoller-Lindsey set her work to three pieces of music by percussionists Tigger Beford and Peter Jones, whose contemporary dance compositions highlight funky, eccentric sounds from prepared piano. “My [choreography] is not that balletic, though a lot of my dancers are ballet-trained,” says Stoller-Lindsey, whose choreographic background is rooted in modern dance. “It’s theatrical, gestural, and athletic.”

Stoller-Lindsey explained the challenges and rewards of the rehearsal process: “There’s always a struggle for choreographers to take something [they] create on [their] own bodies and put it on someone else.” During the first rehearsal, Stoller-Lindsey asked her dancers to improvise to “get a sense of the way they move and respond to the music.”

“I try to be really aware of the ‘accidents’ that happen, the things that people do wrong that actually wind up working really well,” Stoller-Lindsey says of her decision to incorporate some of these accidental movements into her final choreographic scheme.

While these students, unlike their professional counterparts, do not have the luxury of spending all their days dancing, their Harvard education informs their work for the better. “I think any creative process is an aggregate of one’s experiences,” Kuperman says of his two-plus years at Harvard. “I don’t doubt that the shows I’ve seen here, the museums I’ve been to, and the people I’ve met, have influenced what I think about and how I translate those experiences to the stage.”

HANGING IN THE BALANCE