Lynn Marie Ruse and Lynn Brown make piercing, passionate dances with a Southern Flavor.                                                                           

                                                                                                               -Elizabeth Zimmer, Village Voice

 

In its embrace of a multimedia dance aesthetic, the work has a gritty realism that emerges out of a movement vocabulary of kamikaze falls, beer guzzling and tentative waltzes.  The performers led by artistic directors Lynn Marie Ruse and Lynn Brown speak, dance and gesticulate with commitment and abandon.                                                                                                                                                                                      

                                                                                                                -D.K., Toronto's Globe and Mail

 

Lynn Marie Ruse and Lynn Brown have a knack for sculpting grace, strength and beauty.                                                                                                                                                

                                                                                                                           -Micheal Dunn, The Tampa Tribune

 

The peak of my wide-ranging Fringe this year was an hour of dance drama...The Tracking of Expectations presents four Manhattan-based performers in a suite of extravagantly, outrageously physical pas-de-deux about bonding.                                                                                     -Wilder Penfield III, The Toronto Sun

 

"The duo's silken outfits are mirrored by the effortless flow of their movements, which provide a kinetic momentum that echoes the storyline, creating a magical texturalization of balance and space."          

                  -Finbarr O'Reilly, Toronto's Globe and Mail

 

Like all good choreography, the piece succeeds on the basis of what cannot be said.  Its sultry mood and the mounting emotional tension are somehow enveloped in a suggestively larger package of decadence and dystopia.                                                                                             -Michael Crabb, Canada's National Post

 

 

We believe the body moving through space is inherently expressive and that expression is a central part of the

human experience.  We use physicality to bring to light that which smolders just below the surface of daily

existence.  With physical metaphors and exacting gestures that speak clearly of emotional complexity,

FREEFALL has honed their highly personal movement style into a substantial body of creative work.  These

dances explore both the instability and resilience of moving bodies, creating and resolving emotional tension. 

The resulting work articulates the body's secrets in shouts and whispers.

 

In line with these beliefs FREEFALL has created ongoing workshops to share that experience with people of all ages and dance abilities.  We educate and advocate for dance and performing arts in our community, taking our workshops and dances into parking lots, gyms, playing fields and even the Hudson River.  There is a connection between the world of our work, our audiences and our local communities.  We believe the intersection of these worlds results in accessible, personal work.  We strive to build dances, workshops, and performances that actively engage participants while continually challenging their emotional and kinesthetic comfort level.

 

FREEFALL(ltd)  is a New York-based dance and performance group headed by Lynn Brown and Lynn Marie Ruse.  We are committed to the creation of a dynamic, theatrical dance vocabulary with emotionally challenging themes.  Our site-specific pieces show dedication to expanding accepted definitions of concert and community dance.  We have presented work in Dance Theater Workshop's Fresh Tracks and Family Matters series, Dance Now, The Fringe of Toronto Theatre Festival, Toronto's Fringe Festival of Independent Dance, The Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, The Florida Dance Festival, The Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Miami's Florida/Brazil Festival, Chicago's Movable Beast Festival, The University of Rochester, The 92nd Street Y, Dancer's Responding to Aids at Dancespace St. Marks, Up! On the Roof at John Jay College, Dixon Place and University Settlement.  We originally conceived, coordinated and performed A Permanent Thought as a large-scale, site-specific community project in the East Village and have gone on to work with fifteen different populations and sites as diverse as audience members on a Manhattan baseball diamond to 300 school children in a Long Island gym.  Most recently, FREEFALL collaborated with jazz composer Elliot Sharp to create a site-specific piece for the Angel Oransanz Foundation a decaying synagogue on Manhattan's Lower East Side.   This piece was re-created in a river-side roadhouse in Tampa, Florida for the Grand finale of the BONK Festival of Contemporary Classical Music.

 

The Artistic Co-Directors:

Lynn Brown holds his MFA from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.  He has performed nationally and internationally with Keely Garfield, Pooh Kaye, Jody Oberfelder-Reihm, and Victoria Marks.  His work has been presented extensively in the Chicago area and in New York at PS122, Mulberry Street Theater, and on various community groups throughout the city.  He is a Teaching Artist in Dance for the Lincoln Center Institute and the Orchestra of St. Lukes.

 

Lynn Marie Ruse holds a Professional Diploma from the Laban Centre in London and an MFA from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.  She has performed with Henry Montes in London, The Moving Company in Florida (Site-Specific Theater), Clarinda MacLow, Aiden Teker, Athena Molloy, and Rebecca Moore in NYC.  Ruse choreographed Moving Company productions such as Mac Wellman's Why the Y in Ybor? and her choreography has been presented by Dance Force (Hechscher State Park and the World Trade Center), The Florida Dance Festival, The Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, and Wave Hill. She is a Teaching Artist in Dance for Lincoln Center, an adjunct at SUNY Stony Brook, and a yoga instructor.

           

 

Hostage of Love                                                                       Running time: 20 minutes, premiere 2003

Three hostages of passion reconstruct the wreckage of their world in this piece in progress.

 

Homage                                                                                   Running time: 55 minutes, premiere 2002

This collection of short pieces maps out a dangerous, passionate and desperate world.   a short piece about war  intertwines vaudevillian movement with text from the opening speech of the movie Patton, resulting in a solo that draws its dance groove straight from the Marx Brothers.  a short piece about justice marries the spaghetti western to pomo aesthetics.  Trapped on chairs that transform from horses to gallows, three figures cross the plains, protest their innocence, and mete out their own brand of justice.  a short piece about love, starts with Ravel's Bolero and ends up as a Weimer Republic kind of love story, complete with high heels, cigarettes and kazoos.

 

it would still be true                                                                         Running time: 50 minutes, premiere 2001

How do you physicalize truth?  This FREEFALL trio pivots around this slippery philosophical point with a physical landscape pulsing with urban energy.  The three dancers slide amidst each other and define an intimate emotional space while Elliot Sharp's original composition wraps the sharp, linear movement in lyrical noise.

 

The Fifth Story of the Fourth Day                                                           Running time: 50 minutes, premiere 1998

This work is an exploration into the realms of myth and experience, natural and supernatural, with text excerpted from Boccaccio's Decameron.  The erotic, macabre nature of the story has all the elements of a Hollywood potboiler.  FREEFALL's intimate brand of physical theater gives the story a kinesthetic kick into cinematic three-dimensionality. 

 

The Tracking of Expectations                                                       Running time: 55 minutes, premiere 1997

Each section of this three-part evening-length work examines the heated intensity of close relationships and gender complications.  Brown's Marked is a testosterone-driven exploration of the stereotypical props of manhood. Fallen from Grace, by Ruse, traces a migratory friendship along its Southern path.  Together, they have created Forever in Memory, a dreamy montage that uses the kaleidoscope of time to speak of a love gone sour.

 

 

Workshops may be tailored to fit all ages, abilities, and levels of dance or theatrical training.

 

PHYSICAL FICTIONS:  This workshop provides an experiential glimpse into FREEFALL's creative process. It begins with a physical warm-up and continues with directed improvisations designed to unleash wild and unpredictable responses which then become the basis for physical and theatrical storytelling. 

 

MASTER CLASSES IN DANCE and PARTNERING:  Artistic Co-Directors Brown and Ruse--experienced, dynamic teachers have created a technique based on release, floor work, and free-flowing physicality.  Partnering classes stem from FREEFALL's unique duet choreography and stress principles of weight-sharing.

 

REPERTORY:  FREEFALL's choreographic process begins with establishing a physical vocabulary through improvisation.  The directors then hone this vocabulary into passionate, physically potent dances.  FREEFALL is available to re-create repertory or choreograph an original work for any professional, community, or student group. 

 

A PERMANENT THOUGHT:  A large-scale site-specific project originally created and performed for the unveiling of four huge outdoor murals in New York City's Lower East Side.  The basic dance structure has since been used to create new versions using participants as diverse as audience members on a Manhattan baseball field during The DanceNow Festival, teens and professionals at Dance Theater Workshop's Family Matters, and a cast of college students on a proscenium stage at SUNY Stony Brook.  Each cast brings their own personal vitality to the theme, just as each site changes the work's inherent meaning. 

 

LECTURE/DEMONSTRATIONS:  We hold workshops in conjunction with either a lecture/demonstration or full company performance. We begin with a 20 minute excerpt or full performance, followed by a discussion about our choreographic process.

 

VINYASA YOGA:  Ruse, an established yoga teacher in NYC, teaches a vigorous, flowing form of Hatha Yoga.