Framers Unite: Frame Dance Celebrates its Five-Year Anniversary with Framed in Five

By Claire Christine Spera

When Lydia Hance founded Frame Dance Productions in May 2010, she wasn’t looking to develop just a vehicle for her choreography.

“The idea of being an individual choreographer didn’t really excite me. I wanted a context and a community to build,” recounted Artistic Director Hance in a recent interview.

Along with the professional company, Hance created two programs open to the general public, no matter how little dance experience participants may have: Little Framers Children’s Ensemble and the Multi-Generation Ensemble, composed of adults and kids alike. Collectively, these groups make up what Hance affectionately refers to as the “Framer” community, the entirety of which will take part in Hance’s latest production, Framed in Five, running May 1 and 2 in the Margaret Alkek Williams Dance Lab at the Houston Ballet Center for Dance.

A celebration of the fifth anniversary of the founding of the company, Framed in Five comprises three new pieces, each set to original compositions selected from the Frame Dance Music Competition.

Yes, that’s right — Hance’s collaborative, all-inclusive approach spreads beyond the borders of the dance world and into music: “I wanted Frame Dance to be about collaboration, and I feel really passionate about emerging composers, so we established the Frame Dance Music Competition,” said Hance. Open to all American composers, including ex-pats, the competition this year was judged by former winners along with Hance.

Boston-based Robert Honstein is one of three composers whose music was selected for Framed in Five. Hance chose his 22-minute piece, An Index of Possibility, because it was so different from any music she’d ever worked with before.

“It freaks me out,” said Hance. “It completely scared me. I made this rule that I wanted to choose something that pushed me out of my comfort zone. It has the most dynamic range. It starts out quiet with bell sounds, then gets extremely loud and intense. It’s loud and aggressive, and then it suddenly gets soft again. And then it goes back to being loud, and so on, back and forth.” Audiences will experience the full force of the piece when the Baylor Percussion Ensemble plays it live.

Because Hance was working outside her comfort zone, she turned to a more familiar place for inspiration for the movement — the poetry of Pablo Neruda: “Give me silence, water, hope. Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes.”  Hance asked the four dancers to physically spell the poem, drawing the letters that make up the words with their bodies. She also took portions of a prior choreography done with cups — they pushed, scraped and dragged them around the floor — but removed the physical cups from this piece, leaving just the movement behind. “I had to limit the movement vocabulary because the music is so wide apart. I had to restrain myself from too many shapes and too many movements.”

Hance stepped outside her box yet again in selecting California-based Gabriel José Bolaños’ steel string guitar duo composition Ouroboros Miniatures for the second piece: “I’d never worked with guitar before. It’s quirky and it’s intricate. It’s seven mini-pieces of two minutes or less each. Each mini-piece is ripe with its own personality.”

For Hance, the music has a rolling quality; the energy swells and dissipates repeatedly, like a flock of traveling birds. “I went and watched a lot of YouTube videos on people talking about how birds fly and airplanes fly,” said Hance. “I watched these talks and saw how the speakers moved their hands while they talked, and that’s where the inspiration for the arm movements came from.”

But Hance didn’t stop there. Ultimately, the five dancers of Ouroboros Miniatures had a mental challenge before them: “I chopped them in half horizontally and gave them really specific, choppy arm choreography to contrast with more fluid leg choreography.”

The final piece, Austin-based Joel Love’s Lightscape, is divided into four sections: “Dawn,” “Day,” “Dusk” and “Rain.” Nineteen Multi-Generation Ensemble dancers will join Frame Dance Production’s six professional dancers, leading to a blend of children and adults in the piece. It is appropriate, then, that the choreography addresses themes of youth and age, as well as time.

“The piece is not only about time passing, but innocence, and finding and protecting innocence,” said Hance, before adding, “I’ve really done mostly site-specific dance, but we’re doing this one in a theater. I wanted the children to get the theater experience, but also site-specific work requires a whole other level of maturity that kids don’t necessarily have. There are a lot more distractions when you’re working outside the theater, and the theater is a safe space for them.”

In speaking with Hance, what’s clear is that, whatever she sets her mind to — be it a new musical genre, setting her work in a different type of performance space, or even creating a whole new community of curious participants — she approaches it with attack and confidence.

Claire Spera is a dancer and writer based in Austin.