Arts and music come together during dancing. The Traverse City dance project started to make dance more visible in the Northern Michigan community.
Now they created the Northern Michigan dance festival to continue that mission.
“We’re ready for this bigger step. I there’s so much good stuff happening in the fields around us. And right now, it’s super important,” says Resident Choreographer and Co-Founder of TC Dance Project Jennifer Lott. “The arts and culture are very visible. So, i think that what we’re doing is now kind of expanding our community and expanding the community that has, that has access to great dance.”
The Northern Michigan Dance Festival is all about bring dancers close and far to Traverse City. The dance project will also be welcoming dancers back home.
“What the festival is in that it is we’re reaching far and wide from, New York and California and, Miami City Ballet and all these amazing companies to bring them here to perform in one big festival,” says Executive Director of the Traverse City Dance Project Julie Cobble.
A lot experience dance digitally but Co-Founder of the Traverse City Dance Project is excited to bring people face to face with the performances.
“To be up close and personal to that, you really see how it fits in to culture and community and I think also into broader creative conversations,” says Jennifer Lott.
Joffrey Ballet of Chicago dance partners Coco and Zach are coming to Northern Michigan to perform together.
“We are doing two partitas. Two duets, one of them, which we performed previously in May, which is a piece titled rendezvous. It’s a portrait of by Nick Blanc and it’s very fierce, dynamic, sort of abstract,” say Coco Alvarez-Mena and Zach Manske with the Joffrey Chicago Ballet. “More so about ours. Like our partnership. And then I am choreographing a new partita for us called picado, which is Spanish. It’s a Spanish song. It’s sort of a love story between the two of us. It’s. I was playing with romantic movement, sort of this push and pull of, like, a forbidden love, so to speak.”
Coco explains what performing feels like to her.
“What’s going through my mind is nothing other than like the character. But that’s sometimes hard to achieve when you’re thinking about all the things we’re supposed to be thinking about while we’re performing and plus the nerves,” says Coco Alvarez-Mena. “So ideally it would be like during these party days, i’m just thinking about my connection with Zach and like the story we’re trying to tell or just like the weight sharing in our kind of relationship. But yeah, there’s a lot of things that go through your head at the same time. Like counts, choreography lines, maybe even a costume malfunction.”
Another performance that will be at the festival will be performed by the Grand Rapids Ballet Company.
“Since we’re Michigan’s classical ballet company, it made sense to start talking about how we could be a part of this festival, this brand-new venture that he and his team are putting together,” says Grand Rapids Ballet Company Artistic Director James Sofranko.
The Grand Rapids Ballet Company will be performing ‘Be Here Now’
“This is a piece created, a couple of years ago in honor of the 50th anniversary of the summer of love in 1967, San Francisco. It’s a piece that I saw perform in San Francisco, and I really wanted to bring it here to Grand Rapids,” says Sofranko. “It’s a celebration of the culture. The cultural revolution and just the spirit of the young people in that time who were looking for a new way of doing things, of being inclusive, of being loving towards each other.”
The festival has all of types of dance including jazz, ballet, contemporary and live music.
“I think that the take away for something like this festival where we’re really trying to bring in a little something of for everybody,” says Julie Cobble. “They might not be a ballet person, but we have live music, and musicians performing. We have a tap dancer. We have just we have students performing. So if you have younger members of the audience, they can kind of relate and say ‘hey, I might want to learn what that’s like.’ So anybody can take something away.”
