winter 2007 - Concord Academy

darkened room filled with the sound of clotheslapping, like waves in the sea, then rising tobecome more violent: the eerie echo of an oceanstorm, like the storm that crashed Aeneas, hero ofThe Aeneid, onto the shores of Queen Dido.Realizing the squall that had risen, Colton commandedthe dancers to beat even more fiercely,then he quietly played a record—the first notes ofthe opera. In the squall’s eye emerges Aeneas,alone, suddenly still amidst the writhing, and hisDido rises. Aeneas, as if master of the witcheswho squirm around him, whipping their cheapscarves, seemingly disappears, hidden in theirrags. Then, in a moment of delicacy and force, hisleg emerges, the knee first, bent, like an upwardlibidinous prong. A witch’s cloth smacks him asDido’s body descends upon him.The production represents the Dance Company’sannual final project. Each spring, the Companypresents an ambitious work, often incorporatingoutside collaboration and multimedia. Last year’sproduction incorporated photography and theconcept of working outside: photographer Jaye R.Phillips was the collaborator. The preceding year,dancers entered the project via architecture andgeometry, with Concord Academy architectureteacher Chris Rowe collaborating. The two precedingprojects dove from film one year to a combinationof Emily Dickinson and rock-and-rollmusic the next.For Dido, Colton chose to enter through costumes.Many of the dancers saw an exhibit,“AngloMania,” over the summer at the Metro -politan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute andurged Colton to go. Impressed, he decided thatfashion could provide the appropriate doorwayinto the world of Dido and Aeneas. DanielMichaelson, a teacher of theatre costume at Ben -nington College in Vermont, is the collaborator.Under his guidance, the dancers absorbed thesensibility of the period through costume, first bymaking collages and sketches, then by creatingcostumes from pieces found among the torpidcontents of their own bulging wardrobes.Michael son, after taking careful note of thegroup’s ideas and aesthetic, later trucked in aselection from Bennington: a lavish and ornatewardrobe from which clothes of kings would beformed and ravished.In one striking homemade costume was BrianMahoney-Pierce ’07, covered only in a loinclothfashioned from real autumn leaves, a postlapsarianthong which he thought befitted Aeneas. Besidehim in the dance studio, Emma McCormick-Daniel Michaelson, a costume design teacher at Bennington College, consulted on Dido and Aeneas.CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 200734David R. Gammons