When Ballet Florida shut its doors in 2009, it left a hole in the local dance world.
But it didn’t disrupt the network of dancers, choreographers and enthusiasts who wanted to see the art of Terpsichore continue under the palms.
Jerry Opdenaker, a 47-year-old performer and choreographer who danced with for 22 years with Pennsylvania Ballet, the Kansas City Ballet and Ballet Florida, stepped into the breach the next year with his own O Dance Company, and not because he wanted to erect a monument to himself.
“There was a need for it for my own selfish reasons, but there was also a need for it in the community. I didn’t want it to be just a self-serving thing. I didn’t want it to be all about me; I wanted it to be a company where I could bring other artists in to express themselves,” Opdenaker said.
“Choreographers need dancers, and dancers need a place to dance,” he said. “And that’s what we had down here. We had all these artists running around with nothing to do and nowhere to do it. It just needed to happen.”
One of the people he came into contact with was a South Florida dancer and Dreyfoos School of the Arts graduate who’d gone off to Opdenaker’s hometown of Philadelphia to study at the University of the Arts, and who worked in the east for several years before the snow of South Philly became too much and she had to come back home.
But Maria Konrad also had reached something of an artistic crossroads. She’d achieved some success early on, choreographing for Trump Plaza in Atlantic City and beginning the early education program at the Koresh Dance Company.
“I kind of hit a dead end. I mean, it was great – I was 23 and choreographing for Trump – but I hit a dead end because there was more that I wanted to say through jazz dance, and nobody would take me seriously because I didn’t have a shaved head or 20,000 piercings. Because that was the scene in Philadelphia. You’ve got to be either really big or really small; there has to be an oddity to you,” said Konrad, 31.
Back in South Florida, she founded the Reach Dance Collective in 2006, beginning with a work called Reflections that avoided the jazz dance clichés of “cheesy smiles and the big fingers,” she said, performing it with a group of advanced young dancers that became the core of the Reach corps. “It was truly a collective group of dancers that wanted to start putting work together.”
Tonight, the two friends and collaborators unite for a program called Some Like It Hot, a collection of 10 dances, some featuring work by Opdenaker or Konrad, others with both of them, and still others featuring dancers just trying their hands at choreography. The program will call on the 32 dancers in the Reach Dance Intensive, a summer workshop that has been rehearsing in the old Loehmann’s building on PGA Boulevard in Palm Beach Gardens.
Opdenaker will be represented by Fragments of a Dream (with music by the Canadian cellist Zoe Keating), A Time for Us (a performance by American violinist Jenny Oaks Baker), Invenio and a collaboration with Konrad called Marilyn (in honor of Marilyn Monroe, who died 50 years ago this month).
In addition to Marilyn, Konrad is supplying Inferno (music by the British DJ Nightmares on Wax) and I’m Gonna Crawl (set to the classic Led Zeppelin ballad). Danielle Armstrong’s La Mer (music by Canadian film composer Mychael Danna) will be on the bill with a filmed performance of a work by Jeremy Coachman called What the Heart Wants, while Donna Goffredo Murray presents an hommage to the American singer and pianist Nina Simone called Nina.
David Cook and Kiandra Hering team up for This Land Is Your Land (music by Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings), and there is a film featuring a piece called Feed the Arts, choreographed by Rachael Leonard, artistic director of the Surfside Contemporary Dance Theater company in New Smyrna Beach.
During the season, the two companies will be presenting different shows of their own, including Reach’s Alice: Traditionally Twisted, a jazz ballet first performed in 2009, and an O Dance show sometime in March. They’ll team again for a joint show in January.
“What I have always said is that our companies are sister companies – twin sisters,” Opdenaker said, with Konrad focusing on jazz dance and Opdenaker on contemporary concert dance. “It’s slightly different, but just enough different that you need to keep it separate.”
Dance companies face the same kinds of money shortfalls all arts organizations run into, seemingly regardless of the health or sickness of the economy. And South Florida’s dance companies are generally quite young — Miami City Ballet, for instance, is only in its 25th year – and that makes it tougher to get the word out.
“I think there’s not enough education in the arts, compared to up north, and I also think there’s a fight for funding,” Konrad said.
Opdenaker quickly seconded that notion.
“Funding in the larger sense, and in the private sector, too,” he said. “I think we’re all after the same dollar bill.”
The two make a point of saying that working together makes them stronger than they are apart, and that they are committed to making sure Palm Beach County has a good dance scene. Dance itself, they say, has something special other art forms don’t have.
“When good dancing is happening on stage, you feel,” Konrad said. “It tells the story of the body, it tells the story of the soul. It connects music, it connects theater and it puts it right in the middle with movement. And everybody can connect with those things.”
Opdenaker also said dance is a unifying art of other disciplines, and one that’s grounded in our essential identities as people.
“Dance is one of the first things we as humans did,” he said. “We danced, we moved. Before we had speech, we had dance. It’s watching someone move through space without words to relay their emotions, their passions, their desires.
“It gives the visual to what was not visual. Music sweeps you along, but it’s indescribable; dance gives it the describable.”
Some Like It Hot will be presented at 8 tonight at the Eissey Campus Theatre on the campus of Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens. Tickets range from $15 to $20. Call 561-339-3360 or visit www.reachdancecompany.com.