This month we announce our “Artist Spotlight” with Contemporary Dance Company, Numinous Flux as they perform their latest piece of work BREATHE.
Since early 2018 this local Nashville dance company has been writing and producing this performance revealing the complexity of the journey of mental and emotional health. Breathe is an expression of the inner life and what we carry inside ourselves becoming tangible through movement and imagery.
*ONE NIGHT ONLY* RSVP NOW - Reserve your FREE TIX HERE!!
*Tickets are complimentary but must be RESERVED. Please consider making a donation to keep the artistic non-profit growing and performing. Donate TODAY!
At SAINT ELLE we have always been inspired by the creative spirit that defines Nashville and are excited to host this evening of art & community!!
A Cash Bar will be serving Beer, Wine & and Curated Cocktails, so join us at 6:30pm to share a cocktail and connect before this amazing performance.
Read more about Numinous Flux and their Creative Director + Founder, Laura Valentine, in our interview below.
Tell us a little bit about your background and why you created Numinous Flux?
In my youth, I trained at Rhythm Dance Center in Marietta, GA in a variety of styles, and performed with a rigorous competition team, I also participated in quite a bit of theatre and musical theatre around the community. I later attended Appalachian State University where I focused on modern, contemporary, improvisation and my discovered my main love, choreography. Though college was my entry into the official realm of choreography, my true understanding of movement as an artform came to me unexpectedly and visited me long before my schooling: in doorways, laying awake in bed, in traffic patterns and waiting rooms, in jazz clubs, in long conversations, at galleries, at the grave, on the table, giving birth, being thrown in the lake, deep within me and inside my wild dreamscape.
I have always longed to become part of what moves or doesn't move. To feel into the world around me and within me and acknowledge its beauty. To externalize it into shapes and fluent sculpture. Then to reach deeper for the meaning and connection behind it all. To find a shared inner movement between artist and audience. Numinous has been my greatest inlet and outlet. Poetry in physical form.
Photos | BREATHE Ireland Photographer: Teyana Maryshko
Producers: Whitney Gorbett + Rachel Delap
What is the inspiration for BREATHE?
Sometimes when an experience elicits a strong emotion or reaction, the inside of the body can hold multiple sensations at once. Each of the five dancers in Breathe represents one part of a whole. This bodied work; an abstract moving mosaic of selves. The movement illustrates how our inner parts can become polarized and go to war with each other at a certain thought or in a moment of high intensity or sensation. Part of us holds the shame, part of us rages, part of us holds a loneliness or compliance and our mindful part must make all our parts feel like welcome guests and move from being a passive observer, to an active being. I like to think of this show as moving from a cacophony of conflict into one harmonious breath.
How was the Numinous Flux collective formed?
My biggest dream was always to direct a dance company. In my early days, I spent hours moving my rock collection into different configurations and pretending each rock was a beautiful dancer. Foreshadowing my life to come. I began putting on full length productions as a junior in college, and continued building communities of dancers well into adulthood, changing up the name of the collective every so often, but always with a focus on relationship and healing. Each new show fell into place naturally, and eventually Numinous Flux, as a name, stuck. It felt right. Numinous meaning simultaneous fear and awe and flux being an exchange of energy. It certainly has a magical quality to it; this company. We never hold auditions. The dancer's arrivals are each unique and timely. People seem to be drawn in or out in the right moment of life. The work almost seems to determine who will embody it; and my job seems to be to listen to the work and trust in it.
How long have they been performing?
Numinous Flux has been a performing company since 2014.
BREATHE Ireland
How are the dances created? Does each dancer choreograph their own piece?
I choreograph each piece of the work, but the creative process is always different. When I begin working on a show, everything becomes relevant. Everything in my life gets folded into the movement. Sometimes the music comes to me first, other times I see the story taking shape and hear the song later. Once I saw a man arguing on the phone on a cement staircase in downtown Nashville. Hands flailing, frustration faced, then a sudden stillness... that man became the inspiration for the first piece after intermission of Breathe. Most often after I set the movement or direction, it becomes more of a relational process with those embodying it. It's never business; its always personal. Crossing thresholds to bring what's inside of each dancer to the outside. Working with the chemistry that evolves between the artists in the room. And giving space for moments of improvisation, so that the work is happening in real time. With each piece, once choreography is set, it becomes a highly collaborative process emotionally. The sensing of the art so affects the making of it. A dancer's interpretation is an ornate key. A movement done in jest reads much differently than the same movement done in fear.
What is something about this work that someone might not pick up on immediately?
There is a lot of symbolism in this show, Breathe. Boxes being taken down, a glass wall, rice, the corners of the stage, a veil. Each layered with meaning to further explore the beauty of the work. Each dancer has a different relationship with the fixtures onstage. This is all purposeful. A veil can suggest many things: a wedding, death, a covering, something spiritual, breath... These objects are like keys that open us further and help us find more meaning in the transformative creative process.
If you could choose one word to describe the emotion of this production, what would it be and why?
Intense - because that is the word I would use to describe my life experience, which is where Breathe originates.