October 15, 2019 | UHCL Staff
Even if you thought that attending a performance of contemporary ballet isn’t something you’d be interested in, Pascal Rioult, artistic director and choreographer of Rioult Dance NY, says it’s not about ballet, it’s about people. Rioult, a New York-based modern dance company will be performing at University of Houston-Clear Lake's Bayou Theater Oct. 19, 7:30 p.m.
“We are a modern, contemporary dance company, but we have a very classical core,” Rioult said. “We’re highly technical and very athletic, and it’s an emotional and sensual performance. The program is titled ‘From Purple to Pärt’ and it’s comprised of two pieces that are both autobiographical.”
Rioult said that although he’s a classical dancer and choreographer, it had always been in the back of his mind to do a rock and roll-based performance. “Long before I ever thought I would be a classical dancer, I loved to dance in clubs all night long,” he said. “I loved the music of bands like Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. They were trying to give rock and roll something more. The songs were longer, which meant you could dance more,” he said. “The lyrics were not that important; the music was experimental and fabulous. It is a huge departure for me to do this performance.”
He said he thought it would be really interesting to revisit that music as a professional dancer. “It’s not a piece of nostalgia,” he said. “I just loved it so much, I wanted to share it with the audience. It’s really the incredible energy of the music and the time itself, so I picked four songs from Deep Purple. I think it’s very accessible to the audience — maybe they will want to get up on stage and dance too.”
If people don’t feel like dancing, he said, they’ll certainly enjoy looking at the costumes. “The costumes are very wild,” he said. “We have made it a bit like a rock concert, with colored moving lights and smoke.”
The show’s second part, Rioult explained, is a religious text set to music. “It’s the ‘Te Deum;’ one of the first pieces I ever choreographed,” he said. “It is the story of a man who is looking for the right path, lost between the past and the future — and that was actually me, after I had left my career dancing with Martha Graham after 10 years, starting again as a choreographer and not knowing what would happen.”
He described it as a very poetic, visually beautiful journey of a man searching for truth and inspiration as an artist. “A central point in the piece is a duet between male dancers, one older and one younger,” he said. “Two years ago, I finally realized that it was basically me dancing with my younger self; the one I had to let go and face the fear of the unknown. For humans, this is a big part of the psyche. For an artist, this is renewed in a small dose every time a new piece is begun and you don’t know where you’re going with it.”
Arvo Pärt, he added, is an Estonian composer of classical and spiritual music.
“People can bring their own perspectives into these works,” he said. “It’s not about the ballet, it’s about the psychological and emotional journey that everyone has gone through. That’s what a work of art is about. People can let themselves be taken into the journey.”
Find out more or purchase tickets for Bayou Theater performances online.
