A Life in Motion: René Neville celebrates 50 years of dance

“Dance is kind of in many ways like the redheaded step child of the arts,” says René Neville, dancer and choreographer of the upcoming multimedia dance performance ALT-50. “After music and theatre and art and film it's like, Oh yeah! There's dance! We're small but we're mighty.”

Neville - who works in the music department at Binghamton University and as artistic director of EPAC’s resident dance company Dance Stories - launched this multimedia project to celebrate her 50th year of dancing. By bringing together collaborators and influences, she hopes to spark interest in those less familiar with dance as an art form. And with a cast of about 30 choreographers, dancers, and actors, ALT-50 boasts a team large enough to meet the breadth of the project.

The story told in this production is that of the multi-faceted life of an artist. Each chapter is a dance performed in front of video projections produced by René. The pieces encompass spoken-word poetry - some original and some borrowed - delivered by actors in the form of dialogue. She says she always employs multimedia “because I want the audience to - with these complex ideas - give them every tool that I can conceivably think of to help them also to get to that point.” She wants to show that dance, often seen as esoteric or inaccessible, is as powerful and effective an art form as any other.

In telling the story of an artist’s life, ALT-50 starts all the way at the beginning; the opening piece, “Emergence,” is about the birth of the artist as an infant, already bearing purpose. Progressing through the creative life, “Chronicles” is a piece about collaboration between artists and what emerges when different perspectives come together.

“It truly is the idea of whenever you sound the drums, you just gather the tribes and dance and we all come together,” René says, referencing “Unity,” a piece which opens with a poem by Maya Angelou. Depicting the darker side of being an artist, “Vices” illustrates how the things that sometimes inspire creativity can also shut down the process, when they grow too powerful.

Each of the dozen pieces has a one-word title, the stages of life alternatively named. They are also one of the many tools René has provided to guide those audience. Another guide is, of course, music, which ranges from Meredith Monk to Enya to Bobby McFerrin. Two pieces are accompanied by original music: BU student Carle Wirshba wrote the music for “Nexus,” and the closing piece “Fete” was composed by BU music professor Laurence Elder.

Neville prizes collaboration, and many of those involved in the production are friends and artists with whom she has worked over her long life as a dancer, bridging the efforts of individuals from within the Triple Cities as well as from Ithaca, Horseheads, and Elmira.

The discipline of dance, she notes, lends itself to a lot of cooperation. “By and large, normally, when I think [of] all of us when we're creating our art, our dances, we see in our minds more than just one person in it or two people in it; we have a tendency to think bigger and we think numbers.”

There is also the necessity of space, along with other preconceptions, that might contribute to dance’s otherness in the art world. “People aren't used to just seeing dance as just simply an art,” she muses, “that it's not a recital, it's not some sort of a competition.”

With this project and other ventures, René always has her eyes on opening dance up to those who might have already put up their own mental barricades to it. The fear is evident; she even titled her beginner modern dance class, “Stretch, Relaxation, and Movement,” intentionally omitting the word “dance,” so as not to deter people who have already decided that they are not dancers.

To René, everybody is a dancer. “If you're at Wegmans and you're reaching over the produce bin - I mean, there's just a beauty of movement everywhere, right? And it's just people don't realize that they're dancing, and that their life is filled with dance, and I think it's just my duty to point that out to them.”

ALT-50 will run as a one-time performance at 7:30pm on Saturday, April 22nd at the Endicott Performing Arts Center (EPAC) located at 102 Washington Ave. in Endicott. Tickets are $20 for adults, $15 for seniors, and free for children under 12, and can be purchased by calling EPAC at (607) 785-8903.