Repertory and Photo Gallery

Wreckage
Choreographers: Lynn Brown and Lynn Marie Ruse
Original Cast: Lynn Brown and Lynn Marie Ruse
Music: Eric Lyon
Costumes: Lynn Marie Ruse

Well before the events of September 11, composer Eric Lyon had begun working with the sounds of wreckage: the sounds of air being sucked from a hollow object, a body ricocheting through space, and metal crumpling. With Eric, we want to experience wreckage from many possible perspectives. FREEFALL choreographers Brown and Ruse are currently performing a duet that will be source material for movement vocabulary and structure, then be improvisationally “wrecked” in rehearsal in collaboration with three additional dancers. The resulting duets, trios, and group passages will be set and honed in collaboration with Lyon’s music allowing the layers of sound, movement vocabulary, and emotions to resonate fully into a coherent whole which explores themes of physical intimacy, collisions of bodies, and structures resulting from impact, decay, wreckage, interception and interaction. Lyon will perform live with the group in all performances.

Homage:
a short piece about war
Choreographers: Lynn Brown and Lynn Marie Ruse
Original Cast: Lynn Brown
Music: This is Dedicated to the One I Love, The Mamas and the Papas; To Sir with Love, LuLu
Text: adapted from the screenplay for Patton, written by Edmund H. North and Francis Ford Coppola
Costumes: Lynn Marie Ruse

a short piece about love
Choreographer: Lynn Marie Ruse
Performers: Alison Armbruster-Russell, Lynn Marie Ruse
Music: Bolero, Ravel

Homage is a two-part piece dealing with grand themes. In a short piece about war (co-created with fellow Artistic Co-Director Lynn Brown), we twist the text from the opening speech of the movie Patton to irreverently address male bravado and inspirational reterict. The resulting solo for Brown draws its dance groove straight from the Marx Brothers while sporting an attitude that’s all irony. The companion dance, a short piece about love, starts with Ravel’s Bolero and ends up as a very Weimer Republic kind of love story, complete with high heels, cigarettes and kazoos. Humor, musicality, and a powerfully detailed physicality give these pieces an overall density that suggests desperate, passionate times.

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High Windows
Choreographers: Lynn Brown and Lynn Marie Ruse
Original Cast: Lynn Brown and Lynn Marie Ruse
Music: Medea Mei-Figner, Medeski, Martin and Wood
Costumes: Lynn Marie Ruse

Remember These Shores
Choreography: Lynn Brown and Lynn Marie Ruse
Original cast: Lynn Brown and Lynn Marie Ruse
Music: Johannes Strauss
Costumes: Lynn Marie Ruse

Cinematic imagery and whimsical musicality bring a dream to life. What better metaphor for a relationship than two people lost at sea? Remember These Shores is a site-specific dance designed to be performed on the water. Previously shown on the Hudson River, off of Red Hook and on the Gowanus Canal. It charts the give and take of two survivors on an inflatable boat set to the Blue Danube Waltz.

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It Would Still Be True
Choreographers: Lynn Brown and Lynn Marie Ruse
Original Cast: Lynn Brown, Lynn Marie Ruse, Andrew Megginson
Music: Elliot Sharp
Costumes: Lynn Marie Ruse

How do you physicalize truth? This FREEFALL trio pivots around this slippery philosophical point with a physical landscape pulsing with urban energy. Dancers Lynn Brown, Andrew Megginson and Lynn Marie Ruse slide into and around each other, defining an intimate emotional space. Elliot Sharp’s original composition drives the sharp, linear movement while wrapping it in lyrical noise.

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The Fifth Story of the Fourth Day
Choreographers: Lynn Brown and Lynn Marie Ruse
Original Cast: Anna Azrieli, Lynn Brown, Derek Clifford, Lynn Marie Ruse
Music: Brian Eno, Glen Branca
Text: Boccacio, Keats, transcript from NPR All Things Considered, The Rules
Costumes: Lynn Marie Ruse
Set Construction: David Bartlet

With text excerpted from Boccacio’s Decameron, this evening length work is an exploration into the realms of myth and experience, natural and supernatural. The erotic, macabre nature of the story has all the elements of a Hollywood potboiler, while its intimate brand of physical theater gives the story a kinesthetic kick into cinematic three-dimensionality. The edgy interplay between the poetic in both words and movement combine to create a work with as decidedly modern point of view.

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 Dance Now Festival and teens and professionals dancers at Dance Theater Workshop’s Family Matters. Each cast brings their own personal vitality to the theme, just as each site changes the work’s inherent meaning. It can be tailored for any community, dance or student group.

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National Forest
Choreographers: Lynn Marie Ruse
Original Cast: Amelia Derezinski and Erin Reck of Torque Dance
Music: Henry Threadgill
Costumes: Lynn Marie Ruse
Video: BBQ Productions

National Forest is a thrilling journey of two women through the forest of their psyches, revealing images of innocence, experience, fear and freedom. Projected behind the dancers is a video of the duet shot at the East River Park in New York City.

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Swoop
Choreographers: Lynn Brown and Lynn Marie Ruse
Original Cast: Lynn Brown and Lynn Marie Ruse
Costumes: Lynn Marie Ruse
Environment: John Toth

Within an environment of fabric and light created by John Toth in the AudArt Gallery, Swoop asks the romantic question, can a man and woman really connect if she is trapped in a harness that dangles her three feet from the floor? Or is it just a circus? For that matter, is a circus just a circus? While unable to agree on the answers, Swoop brought thrilling suspended work literally into the laps of its audience.

The Tracking of Expectations
Choreographers: Lynn Brown and Lynn Marie Ruse
Original Cast: Lewis Bossing, Lynn Brown, Lynn Marie Ruse, Mary Spring
Music: They Might Be Giants, Muddy Waters, Latin Playboys
Costumes: Lynn Marie Ruse

Each section of this three-part evening-length work examines the heated intensity of close relationships and the gender issues that complicate them. Lynn Brown’s Marked, is a testosterone-driven exploration of the standard props of manhood. Fallen From Grace, by Lynn Marie 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. Dramatic physical vocabulary, theatrical presentation, and the common theme of friendship binds these three dances into a complete portrait.