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night,
day & the golden hour
Lincoln
Hall, Portland State University, 1620 SW Park Ave.,
725-3307. 8 pm Friday-Saturday,
3 pm Sunday,
Oct. 13-15.
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Life is all about timing, and, for dancers, timing is everything.
Just ask Teresa Mathern. An accomplished dancer and choreographer,
Mathern first bounded onto the local scene as a member of
Portland State University's timely Company We Keep. Knowing
that it was time to move on in her exploration of dance,
Mathern left Portland for New York, where she spent time
in the dance studios of Stephen Petronio and Trisha Brown
while working on a master's degree at NYU. In the late 1990s,
though, Mathern moved back to Portland. Since 1997, Mathern
has been a core artist of Conduit and a very busy member
of the local dance community, both as instructor and as
choreographer.
This week Mathern will take time out in her jam-packed
schedule to return to her old PSU stomping grounds. For
three performances, audiences will be treated to a concert
of new and previously performed works. The show features
Mathern's brand-new trio of solos for women, Red Sonnet,
as well as her highly acclaimed duet with Minh Tran, Evidence
of Division. Mathern will begin each performance with
Tran's Optimum, a solo from 1993. This will be the
first time that Mathern herself has performed the piece.
During a sunny, mid-afternoon rehearsal break at her Conduit
home, she seemed most excited to talk about her latest group
work, night, day & the golden hour.
In this piece, Mathern and Tran will be joined by fellow
dancers Jae Diego, Jenn Gierada and Rhonda Summer. For Mathern
it has been a providential opportunity.
"As we count off the hours, minutes, seconds of our digitized
lives, a fundamental division of time--between lightness
and darkness--is often lost," says Mathern. "In night,
day, & the golden hour, I wanted to explore notions
of how we perceive, construct and measure that time."
Night, Mathern believes, represents a time without
measuring devices. "It is a time that pays attention to
stillness and dreamy suspension," she says. "Day, in opposition,
deals with divided time, regulated by clock hands and driven
by progression. The golden hour is the transitional, fleeting
time binding the opposing worlds of night and day when light
is especially vibrant--a momentary, suspended utopia."
Although Mathern believes that all dancers have a heightened
sense of timing, she and Tran seem to have a special relationship
onstage. Watching them in rehearsal, you notice a highly
developed code of communicating, which is extremely important
for performing Mathern's choreography of fast-paced gestures
and razor-sharp footwork.
"The reason Minh and I keep working together is that we
have a movement commonality," Mathern says. "Movement-wise,
we are both swift and clear. It's almost as if we can read
each other's mind. It's like magic."
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