ISHIDA Dance Artistic Director Brett Ishida has worked far and wide, including a stint in Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in Montreal, and her taste skews toward the experimental, boundary-breaking choreography she experienced there and in Europe. That exploratory form continues with ISHIDA.
With her work, Ishida tries to build a bridge between pure movement and classical training, a way to make something esoteric intensely relatable. She’s not just choreographing the dances. She’s her own dramaturg, putting her degree in literature and education training to work on scripts and group discussions. Ishida carefully weighs the impact of her presentations, talking through each dance’s emotion and circumstance with her company, then considering the space and lighting and sound. While the dances are beautiful feats of strength, a true feast for the eyes, Ishida and her crew work to foster something more for the viewer: a psychic connection, an ineffable emotion deep in their soul.
This January, ISHIDA Dance’s first biannual showcase, as long as there is in me, features four explosive dances new to Texas audiences. Two are works by guest choreographers Mauro Astolfi and Drew Jacoby. Astolfi is the founder of Spellbound Contemporary Ballet in Rome, and blends a hip-hop sensibility into the classical precision of his work. The result looks like dancers were set to 2.0 speed on YouTube – they move impossibly fast across the stage. It’s unmistakably balletic, as dancers’ gorgeous lines present in otherworldly motions. American choreographer Jacoby is another disruptive dance voice. She’s worked within photography and fashion. Her work is expressive, image-aware even while bursting through classic norms. There are still flowing moves that exhibit the grace of her dancers – just with a delicious, cinematic layer on top.
Ishida herself is world-premiering two pieces during the show. Both combine her empathic storytelling with startling strength. In one of them, “soul-writer,” the director confronts personal relationships. When I asked about her inspirations over coffee the week before rehearsals began, she nimbly turned the questions toward me. “Have you ever had a dream about someone who passed away?” Ishida asked. “What’s the feeling that you’re left with?” Those questions fueled her creation. She interviewed many people – friends, family, random acquaintances – and discovered cosmic commonalities that became the base of “soul-writer.” There, characters find themselves in a crowded space, randomly intersecting with their own important lost ones. It waxes ethereal, with figures standing as faint whispers of Grecian archetypes and afterworld mysticism.
Not all of Ishida’s personal choreography dabbles in existential seriousness, however. Her other, as yet untitled, work premiering during the show takes Tchaikovsky’s classic Swan Lake duet and subverts expectations. According to her, the original ballet is a showcase for the prima ballerina, but the male danseur sort of sits in the back. It’s time for a different duet, she says – one where both dancers are shown in all their athleticism and flexibility. It’s a more confrontational adaptation, a battle befitting the drama of Tchaikovsky’s score.
During our coffee chat, Ishida revealed that “the works are meant to prompt self-investigation” – investigation during the creative process between the choreographer and the dancers, but also within the audience. She doesn’t want viewers to walk away from the show with a surface-level appreciation of how pretty it was. “I want people to come to our show and be … changed,” she said. They should “be haunted by this image that they had in their mind,” Ishida added. “Something that they saw, or a sensation that they felt they didn’t have once or they needed to just process that or reflect on it further.”
ISHIDA Dance isn’t content with offering something beautiful. as long as there is in me isn’t just here to entertain. It’s here to enlighten.
ISHIDA Dance presents as long as there is in me
Monday 13 – Tuesday 14, The Rollins Theatre at the Long Center for the Performing Arts
This article appears in January 10 • 2025.
