Houston’s Dance Masters Are Ending Their Season With a World Premiere Bang — Ishida Dance Takes Over the Asia Society

Ishida Dance Company, the creation of choreographer and artistic director Brett Ishida, is hitting its stride. Now in its sixth year, the company is recognized as Houston’s premier contemporary dance company, and is gaining a reputation as one of the country’s most exciting dance organizations.

After a sold-out run in January at the Hobby Center and the hugely successful world premiere of what I was thinking while I was waltzing, created for Houston Ballet’s Jubilee of Dance, Ishida Dance finishes its season with a run of performances at the Asia Society Texas Center from June 12 to June 15.

Going To The Cutting Edge

Brett Ishida’s work stands out as it reaches beyond the proverbial cutting edge, going wider and deeper. Audiences are drawn into the deeply personal memories and distillations of relationships that Ishida brings to life through the lush movement of her choreography, captivating choices of music and alternatingly intense and subtle mood-provoking lighting.

Particularly affecting are the complex intertwinings of Ishida’s intricate pas de deux. With their dramatic lifts and demand for virtuosic partnering, they are sometimes tender, sometimes sorrowful and sometimes angry. But regardless of the required athleticism to perform, they remain beautiful and dusted with grace. For audiences, the effect can be transformative, touching an interior garden long forgotten or unexplored.

The star piece of the upcoming program is the world premiere of Ishida’s inside my walls, set to the intriguing music of Olivier Coates, Agnes Obel and Park Jiha. Before going to this Houston dance performance, it may be beneficial to listen to a piece or two by these living musicians, composers, and sound creators as an entrée into the characteristically mesmerizing experience Ishida creates.

Brett Ishida says inside my walls is influenced by the magical realism of famed Japanese author Haruki Murakami and what she calls “the distinct worlds he creates.”

She tells PaperCity she has been pondering these lines from Murakami’s most recent novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls: “What is real, and what is not? In this world is there really something like a wall separating reality from the unreal? I think there might be. No, not might be — there is one.

“But it’s an entirely uncertain wall. Depending on the circumstances and the person, its texture, its shape transforms. Like some living being.”

Ishida says her new work contemplates these questions and their responses.

“I like to work in terms of today, of our time, to go inside and contemplate how people do change, can change, given that people are shaped by what they want to believe,” Brett Ishida says. “The works being performed are cerebral, with psychological layers that invite our audience to identify with these characters through the movement and the music.”

Ishida’s dance creations are far from untethered aerial imaginings. They rest on seemingly disparate foundations, both which are evident in her work. 

The first is her childhood. Growing up on her grandparents’ citrus farm in a conservative community in California’s San Joachim Valley without much arts available, Ishida says she spent her young childhood “creating worlds.” She recalls two distinctly different activities: roaming the fields, and spending time in the back of the community theater where her mother, a librarian, enjoyed acting. 

“Even at the age of 5, I was crafting productions — and got my older brother to do the lights,” Brett Ishida notes.

She describes her world as a series of contrasts: the farm bordered by a swamp, lines of order juxtaposed with murkiness, safe but wild. 

“All of this shaped who I am, and the work I create,” Ishida says. “What I’m doing now had to happen. It wasn’t a choice.”

A second pillar of her work is more tangible. After dancing professionally with Boston Ballet, Oregon Ballet Theatre and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, Brett Ishida returned to California to attend UCLA, where she earned a degree in comparative literature with an emphasis on poetry — and developed a special love of classical Greece.

Some of her work draws on ancient Greek myth or poetry. Her exquisite January world premiere, as long as there is in me, drew its title from a fragment by Sappho, the ancient Greek lyrical poet.

In the upcoming program, audiences will recognize the influence of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in Ishida’s second piece, when shall we three meet again. Now part of the ISHIDA repertoire, it debuted in Houston in 2022 and was part of the Shakespeare Everywhere Festival at The Washington Ballet in 2023. Ishida transforms Shakespeare’s three witches, sometimes called “the weird sisters,” into a dreamscape based on her mother and two aunts.

“It explores their relationship,” Brett Ishida says. “Their manipulation, yes. But also their strong protective bond.”  

Ishida Dance Anticipation

In addition to the two works by Brett Ishida, the program includes a much-anticipated world premiere by guest choreographer Stephen Shropshire.

Shropshire’s new work, Schubert Songs, is choreographed to a selection of Lieder by Austrian composer Franz Schubert (1797 to 1828). Schubert’s texts by Wilhelm Müller, Matthias Claudius and Heinrich Heine are iconic of the Romantic period and much cherished as exponents of the genre. He uses Schubert’s songs as a choreographic framework, re-writing their texts as dance.

“My interest is not to represent the songs’ meaning, but to see where their words take me, where they move, what else they can do,” Shropshire says.

Shropshire is former artistic director of Noord Nederlandse Dans and was artistic coordinator of Nederlandse Dansdagen dansMusem. He is a graduate of the Juilliard School in New York City and a doctoral candidate at PhDArts, Leiden University Academy of Creative and Performing Arts in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague.

Closing the program is renowned Greek choreographer Andonis Foniadakis’ Horizons, set to an original composition by his close collaborator — the French composer Julien Tarride.

The evening promises to be a unique opportunity to see some of the best and most captivating choreography from Europe and the United States.

ISHIDA Dance Company’s “inside my walls” will premiere in Houston with four performances from June 12 to 15 at Asia Society Texas Center, 1370 Southmore Boulevard. Evening performances are at 8 pm each night. The Sunday matinee begins at 3 pm. For tickets, go here. For more information about ISHIDA Dance Company, go here.