Making Major Dance Events a Houston Thing — ISHIDA Keeps Turning Up the Heat, Bringing Its Magic to Asia Society

ISHIDA Dance Company is returning to the Asia Society Texas Center this Thursday, January 15 through Sunday, January 18, for its winter program Rara avis. This is the early winter season’s hottest ticket for lovers of contemporary dance.

In only six years, ISHIDA artistic director Brett Ishida has created a hugely popular, nationally acclaimed company dedicated to bringing Houston audiences the best in dance performance and cutting-edge choreography — her own, as well as work by emerging and established European artists.

“We’re doing this long term in Houston,” Ishida says. “We’re in it for the long haul.”

Brett Ishida is known for her dramatic psychological narratives. While they are deeply personal to her, she believes they resonate with audiences because of common experiences and shared humanity.

Her work is visually and aurally striking, employing dramatic lighting and a sonic palette that often operates as texture and landscape. At times, it is percussion driven, raw and destabilizing. Her movement vocabulary is complex and ever-evolving, drawing from classical, modern and jazz traditions, while also absorbing circus arts-inflected acrobatics in her soaring sculptural lifts — grounded but always just shy of airborne.

“My whole objective in conceiving this company is that when the lights come up, people have had an experience that triggers memories and has inspired questions about their own lives,” Brett Ishida tells PaperCity. “The works are not simply beautiful. I want our audience to engage their intellect and their past, and insert themselves into the work that, though personal, connects us all as a community.

“We’re doing this at extremely high levels. Our dancers are extraordinary.”

Performance Anxiety

The centerpiece of the evening will be the world premiere of Ishida’s 20-minute Rara avis (rare bird), a term taken from a phrase by the ancient Roman poet Juvenal in his Satires, written 95 to 127 CE. Since then, it has come to mean an exceptionally remarkable or singular person or thing of almost mythic rarity.

The dance follows the inner struggles of a singer returning to the stage after a hiatus. Through each of the five dancers onstage, we see fragments of her psyche that appear in the process of finding the courage to perform again.

The gifted Corah Abbott, who graduated last year from Juilliard with a BFA in dance, is in the lead role. Ishida describes Rara avis as “dance theater,” teasing that Abbott’s beautifully trained voice might add a surprise in the piece. (Hint: the surprise could be a song from the famed Italian singer and actress Mina Anna Mazzini, now 85, who is known simply as Mina.)

Ishida’s second work of the program is Let’s Not Talk About It. In it a  group of old friends gather for a long-overdue reunion dinner. Years have passed and so have relationships, children, divorce and success. The wine flows while memories, tensions and truths are revealed. Childhood memories collide with adult regrets, and slowly we see what time has changed. . . and what it never touched.

A Hallmark Work

Another highlight of the evening will be world-renowned Romanian choreographer Edward Clug’s acclaimed Mutual Comfort, originally created for the prestigious Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT) and inspired by Oskar Schlemmer’s famous painting Bauhaus Stairway.

Mutual Comfort is one of Clug’s most frequently performed works, a pas de deux that explores companionship, physical proximity, shared presence and “comfort” — a contrast with emotional excess and passion.

The piano music of Erik Satie’s hypnotically austere, achingly beautiful Gnossiennes, with its faint private longing and moody modal scales, is the perfect accompaniment for the feeling of timelessness in this work, which made its debut in 2006.

“We are thrilled to bring Mutual Comfort to the U.S., and our dancers can’t wait to perform it,” Brett Ishida says. “This is an event of unusual distinction. The only other opportunity to see this work is if you travel to Europe.”

Also exciting is the world premiere of internationally esteemed British Finnish choreographer Kristian Lever. Lever trained at the prestigious Bolshoi Ballet Academy in Moscow and went on to dance professionally under ballet giant John Neumeier at the Hamburg Ballet, where Lever was commissioned to create his first work.

Like many of the younger choreographers working today, Lever’s work bridges the worlds of dance, theater and cinema, establishing him as a multidimensional artist. As with all the artists Ishida chooses for her carefully constructed programs, we can expect Lever’s work to join the others for an evening of dance that will be emotionally rich and visually compelling.

ISHIDA Dance Company is putting on its winter program Rara avis with four performances set for this Thursday, January 15 through Sunday, January 18 at the Asia Society Texas Center. For more information and tickets, go here.