FOUNTAIN Trailer from Jeremy Wade on Vimeo.
February 15 and 16th at 8 p.m., Velocity Dance Center will try to achieve ecstasy. That doesn’t mean instigator-choreographer Jeremy Wade will, or even any single attendee. His piece Fountain is not about, primarily, what he or you gets out of it — it’s about the audience helping to create a charged atmosphere, and how his work as ” shaman, preacher, and fool” enables him to “receive and transform the energy” of those present.
Wade, American-born but living now in Berlin, graduated from Amsterdam’s School for New Dance Development in 2000, and ever since has been experimenting not simply with the hoary notion of “audience participation,” but with what amounts to live choreography. That is, there’s not a dance event that the audience, on the periphery, participates in; the audience performs the event. It’s a roundabout way to rediscovering the power of ritual. As Wade explained in an interview:
At the same time I was reading about the Buddhist Tantric practice called tonglen. Tonglen is like a compassionate science in which the object is to breathe in the pain and suffering of another and to exhale love and compassion. I became super fascinated with this and also these loving-kindness practices, and so I integrated it one night into one of the group experiences, and then this ended up becoming FOUNTAIN.
It’s always risky to put, truly, the audience at the center of a work because on any given night, the audience may not make that swerve toward ecstasy. (This is something that happens in the music business virtually every night, as musicians are all too familiar.) It’s Wade’s role to confront the obstacles that might get in the way, the distracted self-consciousness, the refusal to surrender to the moment.
He’s familiar with all that — as he said in the same interview: “I wasn’t a trained dancer, and I basically learned how to work with my body through failure and awkwardness and learning to embrace that.” All of this enters a space when you have a crowd learning and expressing themselves through dance, and Wade tries to embody that — he literally breathes it in, carries it, and hopes to give it back changed.
