While Eastern Washington University last year rebranded itself a polytechnic university — a place where students apply their education to the world around them — EWU music students have long found real-world educational opportunities to flex their musical muscles. In recent years these young musicians have composed pieces for the Spokane Symphony, the Spokane String Quartet and now, local dance nonprofit Vytal Movement Dance.
On Friday, Vytal Dance will host its evening-length dance performance "Translations" to live music composed by the EWU Composers Forum, a group of music composition students under Jonathan Middleton, Eastern professor of music theory and composition.
Lexie Powell, artistic director of Vytal Movement Dance, says this show will be the dance company's first featuring entirely original music. Live musicians from Eastern, including current students and recent alums, will provide live music for the entire show, which will span about two hours, including an intermission.
"It's very special to get to work with entirely original music and also having a live component, because we don't often get to perform with live music," Powell says. "Not only is it really fun to get to work locally with other artists, but I feel like it makes it a little bit more unique, like it feels a little bit more special."
The show will feature five dances, each molded by a different duo of choreographer and composer. The composers have created pieces based on different DNA samples, including from donkeys, octopi, jellyfish, orchids and a prion disease. These musicians aren't trying to create an exact sample of what the DNA sounds like, but instead they turn the patterns inside these genes into sound and then interpret those sounds into a song.
"We're very dynamic, so the students are getting experiential learning experience with professionals pretty much on their own after having drafted these pieces with me," Middleton says. "This was especially unique because the choreographers and the composers kind of had a back and forth, so there got to be a conversation around building this piece kind of together."
Middleton has been interested in turning data into music and creating sonifications for more than two decades. Now, he's ensuring that students in one of his music composition classes have the same opportunities.
"We center the class around molecular biology and organic shapes, just to give [students] something to go on. Now we have a collection of pieces that have snippets of DNA from various sources, like orchids, jellyfish, octopi," Middleton says. "The students got to choose the animals to some degree, but they then did those conversions, and then started building musical pieces from the sketches that they managed to develop. The dancers then got to choose which pieces they wanted to choreograph."
One piece, choreographed by Mandy Scheffler, will be set to a song based on the characteristics of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease. This type of disease causes the proteins in a cow's body to misfold, inevitably leading to brain damage and death.
Like the show's music, these dances aren't meant to be literal interpretations. Powell says her choreographers pulled inspiration from their DNA subjects.
"Mandy would take all of our movements and make us change them or put them in different orders," Powell says. "She did a lot of copying and pasting when she was creating her movement and her concept, and she played a lot with folding, because of that DNA."
The throughline for the entire production is translation, but beyond that, each piece is distinct.
"Musicians use DNA to translate into music, and then the choreographers are translating that into movement," Powell says. "Each choreographer explored a different concept within that parameter because the music pieces all sound so different and utilize different instrumentations and have different moods and tones."
In fall 2023, Middleton approached Powell because one of his students was interested in composing music for dance. However, that single piece soon transformed into this evening-length performance with live accompaniment focused on translations.
"The concept of 'translations' applies in some way to the potential conversion of ideas across disciplines," Middleton explains. "Translations took place between biology and music, biology and modern dance, and between new compositions and modern dances."
Middleton also hopes this production will introduce youth in the Inland Northwest — especially those living in more rural areas — to the magic of performing arts. That's why he invited and paid for students from the Wilbur-Creston and Deer Park high schools to attend the production.
Working with local musicians and ensuring that local students can see the performance exemplifies the community collaboration that Powell imagines for Vytal Movement Dance.
"This is my second year as artistic director, and one of my big goals has just been enhanced collaboration in the community and this is, I would argue, the largest collaboration we've done," Powell explains. "You know we started this process almost two years ago, so it's really exciting, and it makes me think about what else we could do." ♦
Translations: An Evening of Original Music & Dance • Fri, May 16 at 7:30 pm • $27-$39 • Bing Crosby Theater • 901 W. Sprague Ave. • vytalmovement.org
