Ingenuity evident in Curran`s minimalist approach

In 1997, after two seasons at New York City’s Danspace Project where the
dancers were paid with subway tokens for rehearsals and dinners after performances, Seán Curran decided it was time to grow up organizationally, to
pay the dancers in real money and to create the Seán Curran Company. Since
those modest beginnings the Seán Curran Company has toured throughout the
United States and performed in festivals in France and Germany.
The company’s first major commission came in 1997 from Celebrate Brooklyn for the piece Folk Dance For the Future. Until then, Seán Curran, who took
traditional Irish step dancing lessons as a child, had resisted using his Irish
voice in the pieces he created. Folk Dance for the Future marked the beginning
of Seán Curran’s incorporation of his Irish background into his choreographic
works.
One of Curran’s most ambitious commissions to date was a 2004 collaboration
between the Seán Curran Company and Broadway composer Ricky Ian Gordon
which resulted in Art/Song/Dance, a work performed by Curran’s company
and Broadway singers.
In Fall 2005, the Seán Curran Company premiered Aria, a work which combines recorded apologies with opera arias by Handel.
Seán Curran (Artistic Director) began his dance training with traditional Irish step dancing
as a young boy in Boston, Massachusetts. He went on to make his mark on the dance world
as a leading dancer with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. He received a New
York Dance and Performance Bessie Award for his performance in Secret Pastures.
A graduate and guest faculty member of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts,
Curran was an original member of the New York City cast of the Off-Broadway percussion extravaganza Stomp, performing in the show for four years. He has performed his solo
evening of dances at venues throughout the United States as well as at Sweden’s Danstation
Theatre and France’s EXIT Festival.
Current and recent projects for Curran include productions of Much Ado About Nothing
and A Midsummer Night’s Dream for The Shakespeare Theater, the twentieth anniversary
production of Nixon in China at Opera Theater of St. Louis; choreography for the New York
City Opera productions of L’Etoile, Alcina, Turandot, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Capriccio, and the upcoming production of Acis and Galetea; the Playwrights Horizons’ production
of My Life with Albertine; Shakespeare in the Park’s As You Like It; and The Rivals at Lincoln
Center Theater. He is also very excited to be choreographing Romeo and Juliette for The
Metropolitan Opera. Curran’s work has appeared on Broadway in James Joyce’s The Dead
for Playwrights Horizons. He has created works for Trinity Irish Dance Company, American
Ballet Theatre’s studio company, Denmark’s Upper Cut Company, Sweden’s Skänes Dance
Theater, Irish Modern Dance Theatre, Ririe Woodbury Dance Theater, and Dance Alloy, as
well as for numerous college and university dance departments.
Curran has taught extensively at the American Dance Festival, Harvard Summer Dance Center, Bates Dance Festival, and Boston’s Conservatory of Music. Irish American Magazine
selected Curran as one of its “Top 100” in the year 2000. Curran was awarded a Choreographer’s Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2002.
Happiest when making new work or performing, Seán Curran hopes to continue being an
ambassador for the art of dance by building and educating the dance audiences of tomorrow.
Press Quotes
“There is no fresher, more invigorating, new
American dance now than the choreography of
Seán Curran.” ~ L.A. Times
“Seán Curran approaches dance making with the
sharp intelligence of a conceptualist and the raw
physicality of an athlete.” ~ The Boston Globe
“When I see something that reminds me what
dancing can be at its most basic, I’m faint with
pleasure.” ~ The Village Voice
“Seán Curran has the stage presence of
a malevolent elf, with a face that gleams
gleefully as he propels his compact
body across the stage with the force of a
stealth rocket.” ~ Baltimore Weekly
“Mr. Curran is an artist with both considerable technique and an unconventional but
irresistible stage presence - a combination
shared by the best of today’s choreographers.” ~ The Baltimore Alternative
“Adults and children alike respond to the meticulously structured
and contagiously high-spirited dances…” ~ The Village Voice
“…the extraordinary Seán Curran, whose Irish step dancing
solo is abstracted into an aerial balletic softness…”
~ The New York Times
“Curran emerges as a sublime choreographer, creating complexly musical phrases for his company that literally rises to
meet his expectations.” ~ The Village Voice
Curran Company steppin’ it up
By Theadore Bale
Monday, January 24, 2005
What a shame yesterday afternoon that Sean Curran Company’s second show of the
weekend was canceled due to the snow. On Saturday night, the group gave a classy
performance at the Tsai Performance Center that proves it has transformed itself
significantly since April 2001, when it last appeared in Boston.
Some local fans will remember that Sean Curran Company gave the final performance
presented by Dance Umbrella, and Curran finished that show with his ever-popular ``Folk
Dance for the Future (Traditional Methods/Postmodern Techniques),’’ a signature work that
he seems, finally, to have shaken. Bank of America Celebrity Series and the Wang Center
presented Curran’s company at the Tsai, and the program began with a very different sort
of folk dance, the introspective ``Sonata: We Are What We Were,’’ set to music by Janacek.
The dances Curran made between 1997 (when he founded his company) and 2001 had a
certain cautionary aspect. In his own emphatic solos, he was more than willing to wear his
heart on his sleeve. But Curran acted as a protective parent when it came to his company
members, framing them in highly formal works that gave us only occasional glimpses of
who the dancers are as everyday people.
In “Sonata’’ one sees an interdependent community of four men and four women who
seem to have endured some collective trauma. Feeling and sentiment arise unconsciously
through the straightforward organization of events: a rigorous male quartet, a harmonious
female quartet and then transmutations of the material through a series of unexpected
pairings. The dance serves well as a companion piece to Curran’s newest effort “Art/Song/
Dance,’’ which focuses more on individual loss.
“Art/Song/Dance’’ is an epic work in a Broadway idiom, performed to Ricky Ian Gordon’s
passionate settings of poems by Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay and others. At
first the quasi-narrative and direct emotion is perplexing - can this be true modern dance?
Curran bravely forsakes symbol and metaphor and goes instead for a sudden punch to the
gut.
In between these two well-crafted ensemble works was the mesmerizing ``Companion
Dances,’’ choreographed and danced by Curran and Heather Waldon-Arnold, and the
deeply expressive solo “St. Petersburg Waltz,’’ set to a piano score by Meredith Monk. The
latter showed Curran vacillating between fallen peasant and obedient soldier, with facial
expressions that formed a Kafkaesque catalog of suffering and alienation.
Jan. 20, 2004, 9:58AM
Ingenuity evident in Curran’s minimalist approach
By MOLLY GLENTZER
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle
Seán Curran’s dances make you smile and not just when the choreography is funny. Watching his company’s
Houston debut at the Wortham Theater Center Friday was like sitting in warm sunshine on a park bench;
sometimes that’s all it takes to make you glad you’re alive.
Other modern-dance companies may impress with the complexity of their steps or body-banging intensity, but
Curran’s genius is in his witty ingenuity. How else to describe the joy of Amadinda Dances, which tricks the eye
through the simplest of devices: costumes that are white in front, black in back, with red sleeves. It’s minimalist
choreography in the spirit of Piet Mondrian.
The dance’s steps are jauntily performed but never bouncey (think of gliding two-steppers doing folk dances or
aerobic exercises). But steps are secondary to the patterns Curran builds with seven bodies, as lines of dancers
alternate turning front to back or raising their arms. Midway through, there’s a break in the music -- Tigger
Benford’s softly percussive score using a boatlike wooden instrument called an amadinda -- and the dancers,
standing in silhouette, pull a costume switch. The women reverse their tops; the men reverse their pants. Now
the stripes become a checkerboard.
Amadinda Dances, created last year, is an instant classic. And it’s beautifully presented alongside 2000’s
Abstract Concrete and 2001’s Metal Garden, which share the same striped backdrop and stage-floor lighting but
trick the eye in other ways. Benford recorded each score with a different type of percussive instrument. (Thus,
in the vein of modern master Trisha Brown, Curran has lately promoted the series as The Percussion Pieces.)
In Abstract Concrete, the costumes are as colorful as a box of crayons. The dancers move back and forth across
the floor’s lighted horizontal stripes, with a lot of difficult lifts. (Bodies as concrete, perhaps? -- Curran’s a
tongue-in-cheek kind of guy.) There’s a central heterosexual couple, but the other four dancers mix it up, often
working as same-sex partners through the unisex, equal-opportunity movement.
Metal Garden is the musical highlight. Here, Benford collaborates with Peter Jones, whose prepared piano
music incorporates metal objects such as paper clips and screws. Metal Garden is also a comedic highlight, with
Curran as the clown. It’s probably no fluke that the dancers, in shimmery silver and gold costumes, appear often
as a tightly knit band of bodies. (A heavy metal band, get it?)
The dancing is flashy, too, full of virtuosic bits. (Curran’s heaving breath is audible, but he goes for broke, outdancing even the youngsters.) At different moments, the dancers might mimic Egyptian friezes, cavemen and
the jitterbug -- but Curran’s dancemaking always offers just a hint of such information before he molds the
movement into something all his own.
Again, stellar moments are not complex: While the dancers, in three couples, take turns stepping through the
“hoops” of each others’ arms like they’re playing some elaborate version of Twister, Curran blithely crosses the
stage, carrying a metal watering can, then a shovel, then a ladder. He glances at them, then at the audience, as if
to say, “Get a load of that.” You get the joke: As the choreographer, he’s the “gardener” here.
For booking information contact:
Carnegie Hall Tower
152 West 57th Street
Fifth Floor
New York, NY 10019
P: 212-994-3500
F: 212-994-3550
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