Julia Ritter is chair and artistic director of the dance department at Rutgers' Mason Gross School of the Arts.
A dance professor at Rutgers' Mason Gross School of the Arts is developing a performance for an unconventional space – the Ottoman Empire’s first power plant in Istanbul, Turkey.
The final work may include choreography staged in a boiler room or even allow dancers to interact with a vintage steam turbine.
Julia Ritter, chair and artistic director of the dance department at Mason Gross, has teamed up with Ayrin Ersoz, one of Turkey’s premier scholars of historic and contemporary dance, on the project. The pair met in 2008 when Ritter traveled to Istanbul on a Fulbright Senior Specialists award to be an artist-in-residence at Yildiz Technical University, which is a public research institution like Rutgers.
Ritter considers this collaboration an opportunity for Rutgers dancers to explore Turkey’s thriving ballet, folk and contemporary modern dance scenes. She hopes such experiences will expand her students’ understanding of dance as a global phenomenon and community.
Rutgers students and graduates will assist Ritter's team as they produce the performance at santraistanbul, which is housed in the former Silahtaraga power plant. The site supplied Istanbul with electricity from 1911 through 1983.
As the professors are separated by two continents and an ocean, they correspond regularly via Skype on large screens in their respective studios to choreograph most of the material for the piece, which will debut in 2014.
This summer, three Rutgers dance students and graduates will accompany Ritter to Turkey to help shape the choreography around the former power plant's structural elements, including its staircases, platforms and hallways.
“We’ll be prepared to do anything,” says Sonja Chung, a 2012 Mason Gross alumna who looks forward to the choreographic process, or “living in the artistry,” even if that includes climbing on a window… or a turbine.
“[Ritter] works from improvisation, so she’ll give us structures and we’ll create improvisational phrases, the phrases will become sentences, the sentences will turn into paragraphs and the paragraphs become the choreography.”
When Ritter studied in Turkey back in 2008, she found artistic and academic common ground with Ersoz, who is director of Yildiz’s dance department. Their meeting sparked ongoing collaboration.
Ayrin Ersoz
Ersoz visited Mason Gross as a guest artist in 2012 and found working with the students and faculty in Rutgers' dance department inspiring.
“[The students] are technically strong, creatively curious and passionate,” Ersoz says. She praised Ritter as an educator who truly reveals the world of dance to her students. “I look forward to the collaboration and the opportunity to exchange ideas.”
The pair decided to embark upon this participatory art collaboration after realizing they shared an aesthetic vision for creating site-specific, politically and socially conscious dance performances. Ritter finds that art involving live elements, including theater, dance, music and broadcast components allows audiences to witness and interact with new art as it is made.
Participatory art may take on many forms. An audience member may no longer be only a spectator. There may not be a conventional audience at all.
“These works are experimental and interdisciplinary by nature,” Ritter says. “Participatory art extends the way audiences see spaces that were constructed for a purpose other than performance.”
When she and her students travel to Istanbul this July, they will meet and stage elements with Ersoz and the remainder of the team, which includes Turkish composer Evrim Demirel and interactive media design professor Asim Evren Yantac. They will all gather at the Silahtaraga/santraistanbul site to explore each crevice of the museum and allow its architecture “to soak into everyone’s pores a bit,” Ritter said.
“I can’t explain how excited I am to work in santraistanbul,” Ritter says. “Spaces shape thoughts, memories and dreams and the museum has beautiful, ideal spaces for performance and projection.”
