Toni Bravo and Company

Toni Bravo in a still moment before movement.

Toni's dancers in the park.

Last year, after seeing Pina in the theater, I became obsessed with modern dance.  The stunningly beautiful documentary by Wim Wenders looks at the life work of Pina Bausch, a German choreographer who explored the depths of the human soul through the movement of the body.  Pina died unexpectedly during the making of the film, and it organically became a kind of memorial with emotional snapshots of the dancers in her company talking about memories of her and performing in honor of her.  As I watched, completely moved, I had one thought: I want to be a dancer in my next life. 

In the meantime I decided to find a class that I could take, just for me, without any expectations or goals.  It took me several months to find the right class and to find the guts to show up, but I finally did.  Who I found was Toni Bravo, and I fell in love.  Toni teaches an obscene number of classes at Ballet Austin, including the modern dance class that I try to show up to as often as possible.  Her classes are for both experienced dancers and complete amateurs, like myself.  She is a tireless and inspired teacher.  I always have a ridiculous smile on my face for the first half of class because what we are doing is so liberating and unusual in the use of my own body, and that smile inevitably turns into dazed confusion in the second half of class as my brain tries to keep up with my body, and vice versa.  Modern dance is freaking hard.  But, I love it.

At the last class Toni explained a particular series of movements as drawings in space. Drawings of straight lines and drawings of curves, from here to there with the hand and here to there with the foot.  That's when I knew for sure I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

Last Sunday evening I attended a performance in Stacy Park choreographed by Toni called One + One + One & Aspects of Shen.  It was a suite of dance: some performed by kids, some by adult dancers, and two performed by Toni solo.  To be outside in the chilly evening air to experience these dances was such a pleasure.  They could have perhaps all been performed on a stage inside, but the green plane of grass and the surrounding trees united the dancers and the viewers in a way that doesn't often happen in a traditional theater.  In All in Time, the first piece of the evening performed by Toni, the viewers surrounded her as she moved within a sea of fabric, a parachute, that enveloped her like a dress and eventually swallowed her whole as the perimeter was lifted up by attached ropes that were draped over the branches of a beautiful old live oak.  But, before the swallowing, Toni's calibrated and exquisite movement of straight line and curved line drawings in space could be seen both through and above the billowing fabric in a way that slowed down time to present.