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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2010 > June > 16 > Entry
Movement is healing for choreographer Lisa del Rosario
Summer’s always a good time to try something new. That’s the case this weekend with the new arts collaboration, Califa. The group is mainly composed of choreographers familiar to Ballet Austin audiences: former dancer Reginald Harris and current star Michelle Thompson. The third choreographer on the free program, which runs Friday and Saturday at Salvage Vanguard, is Lisa del Rosario. A teacher at Ballet Austin’s school and one of Austin’s most thoughtful, yet quirky performers, del Rosario will perform her new solo, “Home With Yellow Fever.”
Austin American-Statesman: How do you straddle being inside a solo as the dancer and outside of it as the choreographer?
Lisa del Rosario: I do little bits at a time because I need to repeat it over and over just to get it into my body. It takes time for me to process what’s going on from the outside. I also have to make sure I’m pacing myself. This piece is really energetic, so I have to make sure the movement isn’t going to kill me.
How did visual artist Allyson Fox inspire ‘Home With Yellow Fever’?
She draws furniture, and she draws people. I chose to use my living room furniture in the piece because I saw that she was an interior designer, too. I like to change the perspective of the space. I use the living room space in a nontraditional way — very distorted and very physical.
‘Yellow Fever’ has a variety of connotations, including xenophobia toward Asians or the idea of white men who only date Asian women. You took the phrase from band’s name — the band that created the music you use. Do the other connotations matter for you?
I think it’s ironic that that was the band’s name, and that I’m an Asian woman. But I’m not personalizing it or taking offense to it at all. I just find it really funny.
You’re a Feldenkrais practitioner. How has that approach to studying movement, the focus connecting movement and thought, changed how you dance?
My repertory of movement blossomed, and now whenever I’m creating movement it almost seemed endless because I can do so much with my body now. Feldenkrais also helped me recover from injuries. My sophomore year at UT I had a stress fracture and started having lots of pain in all my joints. Feldenkrais helped me get out of that really injured place. Then about 7 years ago I was in the Philippines to dance professionally, and a tree fell and crushed half my body. My left arm was totally paralyzed. Once I began to heal, Feldenkrais meant I had the idea that I can think differently. I can still work with what I have, and I was able to heal at the same time.
‘Home With Yellow Fever’
When: 6:30 and 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday
Where: Salvage Vanguard Theater, 2803 Manor Road
Cost: Free (donations appreciated)
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
Photo by Nadine Latief.
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