To Dance On Fire

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It’s a Wednesday night in early November, and 15 students are warming up in studio 305 in Barnard Hall. The mood is light, friendly but ready. With a word from visiting artist Iréne Hultman, the music starts. An instrumental by Nigerian bandleader Fela Kuti blares from speakers, setting the students in motion. They reel, contract, expand, and pirouette, orbiting the floor, filling the space, interpreting the music in ways personal and unique. This is the warm-up to a three-hour rehearsal. The dancers are preparing for an 18-minute piece called Episodes to be performed in just a few weeks at New York Live Arts, the venue founded by celebrated choreographer Bill T. Jones.

This group is one of four sections in the Barnard Dance Department’s popular course Rehearsal and Performance in Dance, which is offered each fall and spring. The class provides students with the opportunity to work with visiting professional dancer/choreographers and take part in the development of a live dance production as performers, choreographers, designers, or stage technicians.

Colleen Thomas-Young, the chair of the Barnard Dance Department and a professor of professional practice, says this course is foundational to Barnard’s dance program and to students who want to pursue dance. “Getting the time to create a work with these guest artists, these professionals in the field, is the most amazing way [for students] to transition to this sort of field,” she explains. “I always try to hire a diverse group of guest artists.”

One of those artists is Hultman. Thomas-Young was drawn to the choreographer because of the work she’d seen early in Hultman’s career. “It was almost cinematic,” says Thomas-Young of Hultman’s early performances. “I hadn’t really seen work like that. There was this underlying emotion that you could feel watching [Hultman]. There’s this sensitivity and a way that she gets at the feeling of a piece. There’s a kinetic transference.”

The Swedish-born Hultman has long been a luminary of the New York City dance world. She performed for five years with the Trisha Brown Dance Company, where she later worked as rehearsal director. In 1988, she founded Iréne Hultman Dance, which received international renown for its work over the next 15 years. She is currently a lecturer in theatre and performance studies at Yale University. This is her first time teaching at Barnard.

“I was very pleased when Colleen asked me to do something,” says Hultman, who finds working with students to be an interesting challenge. “It’s different when you choose your dancers from a big professional crowd. When you have students, it’s impossible to know who they are. [At Barnard], I wanted to make something new. It’s been such a pleasure to work with these students.” 

Dance students must audition to be placed in one of the four sections. Each section is led by a different visiting professional choreographer. In addition to Hultman, guest artists MX Oops, Gabrielle Lamb, and Roderick George taught the course this fall.

Dance major Eliza Voorheis ’25 transferred to Barnard from Scripps College for her sophomore year. Barnard’s Dance Department — including the Rehearsal and Performance course — was a big factor in that decision. “This opportunity just shows that dance is being taken very seriously here,” says Voorheis. “It’s not just considered an extracurricular activity.”

Voorheis, who grew up in Massachusetts, began dancing when she was around 4 years old. This is the third time she’s taken the Rehearsal and Performance Dance course. Voorheis has enjoyed Hultman’s course and finds the visiting artist’s approach to improvisational modern dance both a challenge and an opportunity to stretch her range.

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“The improvisational work we’ve done in this has surprised me because it’s so specific,” says Voorheis. “At times, I think of improvisation as this very wide, expansive world in which you can go off and do whatever you want. But that’s not [Hultman’s] philosophy — or at least not for this specific case. She really knows what she wants, and that’s been very demanding. But it’s also really cool to see what comes out of that and how you get creative within these restraints.”

For Katie Sponenburg ’24, a dance and economics double major from New Jersey, the opportunity to blend dance and academics is what drew her to the College. While at Barnard, she’s been focusing on postmodern dance and exploring what she calls “extremes in physical exertion.” Her work in Episodes is intense. “As challenging as it is, I find it more exciting. I love the freedom of getting what I want to do. And I just try to roll with that. I mean, the piece is about desire,” she says.

Sponenburg, too, has taken the Rehearsal and Performance course several times. For this semester, she auditioned only for Hultman’s section. In past years, she would make a point of auditioning for all of the guest artists. “I thought there was a lot of wisdom that she had that I wanted to be part of. That’s what informed me to make this move,” says Sponenburg.

"Episodes" by Iréne Hultman from Barnard College on Vimeo.

“Postmodern dance — they describe it as dancing from your bones,” says Sponenburg. This was a different way of moving for the Barnard senior, who describes herself as an athletic dancer, and was a challenge she embraced. “[Hultman’s approach] is more like a release of energy and just trying to do movement for movement. So, because it’s self-guided, I get to take these risks that maybe I wouldn’t necessarily have the opportunity to take. Here I get to build on what I want to explore.”

“Katie and Eliza are great,” says Hultman. “At first I thought I should [bring to Barnard] all these conceptual ideas. But the students have been making all the movements. I wanted [them] to start in the now.”

Hultman then bases the choreography on the students’ improvisations created from her direction. During rehearsal, if a dancer misses a movement, she gives a kind laugh and gentle correction. The work they’ve created together has a sense of random physical, intimate expression, but each move is sculpted and repeated with exactitude. Yet there’s also flexibility in the shaping.

“[This piece] is like worlds away from where it started,” says Hultman. “So it’s kind of hard to keep up with my brain and my body. I’m learning it new and keeping up. But my vision of the piece has become something of its own.”

Episodes is set to four very different musical pieces, including a baroque instrumental as well as the Doors’ “When the Music’s Over,” ending with Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.”

“The Armstrong song acts as a coda,” says Hultman.

In “When the Music’s Over,” the students move with intensity and grace, facing and mirroring each other, filling the stage — they spiral and leap — all in conversation with the driving rock beat and incantatory lyrics of the Doors.

When the music’s over

Turn out the lights

Turn out the lights

Turn out the lights

Well, the music is your special friend

Dance on fire as it intends

Three dancers, including Voorheis and Sponenburg, circle one another, mirroring a move Hultman calls “the mermaid.” They slither and sink to the floor, undulating back up in perfect unison and down again. The physical expression is poignant, a moment of unity in motion. The piece ends with three other dancers in tableau. Two are on the floor; another squats and brings her palms together as in prayer. Hultman paces and laughs, clearly pleased.