Jerrica Mark and Bryan Peck in Karen Stokes’ Sunset at White Oak Bayou.
Photos Courtesy of Karen Stokes Dance.
“My dad was a history professor at Rice University — an amazing man and my personal hero. I have been surrounded by history and dance my whole life,” said Stokes, artistic director of the six-member Karen Stokes Dance.
October 18’s Sunset at White Oak Bayou is a free-admission, site-specific work, and the third installment of Stokes’ DEEP: Seaspace series. It’ll take place on the north side of Allen’s Landing along White Oak Bayou, where audience members can sit picnic-style on blankets and in lawn chairs.
“Sunset at White Oak Bayou takes my interest in the site and merges it with my dance work. I think it is cool to try to engage audience members via an abstract form — dance — with the surroundings we live in — Houston,” she explained.
The location peaked her interest when she dug into the history of Houston and discovered the city was actually founded on the creation of a myth, or “entrepreneurial exaggeration,” as Stokes calls it. The Allen brothers marketed the area as a thriving port city “having an abundance of excellent spring water and enjoying the sea breeze in all its freshness…It is handsome and beautifully elevated, salubrious and well-watered.” These descriptions enticed settlers to come, and the rest is history; now, Houston is the fourth largest city in the U.S.
Sunset at White Oak Bayou marks the first time Stokes has collaborated with Brad Sayles on an original composition: “Brad and I worked together in a totally new way,” said Stokes. “He asked me for a timeline of what I wanted, and so I scored the work, almost like a film — three minutes of fanfare to open, five minutes of driving, work-force energy, etc. Brad created an amazing score, using some elements from a previous symphonic work he created…I wanted brass because I envisioned the environment to be free of technological elements; no amplification with natural lights. And so I thought brass instruments might work.”
Because the performance site allows the company a large space to explore, Stokes decided just six dancers wasn’t going to be enough, so she brought 10 University of Houston dance students into the mix: “We received an Innovation Grant from the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts for the project, and this provided an opportunity to connect my professional job with my academic job, including incorporating students into my professional creative process,” said Stokes.
February 2-4, 2016 marks the 10th anniversary of another Karen Stokes Dance series, Framing Dance: A Discovery Series, at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, which brings live music, dance and theater to thousands of Houston schoolchildren annually for free.
“For many, this is their first time coming to a downtown theater,” said Stokes. “Many of the students are from economically disadvantaged areas of Houston. The series is regularly fully booked, with 3,000 students coming to a performance event.”
And it’s no small feat that Karen Stokes Dance is celebrating the 10th anniversary of the series this February: “To be able to do any particular show or event for 10 seasons is a strange and wonderful milestone for any modern dance company. We rarely get the opportunity to perform works more than once, which contributes to the ephemerality of the art form,” noted Stokes.
—CLAIRE CHRISTINE SPERA