It’s mind-bending just to contemplate the logistics of “AYA, An Aerial Ballet,” much less to wrangle the planning, rehearsals, and performances, coming up Saturday and Oct. 17 at the Athenaeum. With a total of 26 performers — a number that includes 3 of the 4 director-choreographers — from two companies specializing in different kinds of dance, Aerial Dance Chicago and Elements Contemporary Ballet have had their work cut out for them.
They started just over a year ago, when their marvelous collaborative one-act “Surge” closed after a one-night show at the North Shore Center in Skokie. “Surge” deserved a follow-up — and it’s now the final act of the otherwise-new three-act “AYA.”
As Elements director-choreographer Joseph Caruana puts it during an all-hands-on-deck interview, “With ‘Surge,’ we knew we had an ending to something, but how do we get there, what’s the story? It’s taken a year to figure that out.”
Everything in the two new acts was up for grabs. Fortunately, Elements director-choreographer Mike Gosney explains, “We kind of had the process figured out. We threw the music on the table, the apparatus ideas on the table, the story on the table. We got together and hashed it out.”
“Apparatus ideas” because the dancers spend considerable time suspended above the stage, on rings, silks or “free bars,” which can be driven into the floor to catapult performers skyward, making them into ninja warriors.
Though Caruana’s poem about a tree he saw clinging to a cliff inspired “Surge,” all four director-choreographers — the others are ADC’s Karen Fisher Doyle and Chloe Jensen, who also plays the central figure, Aya — had somewhat different ideas of the story behind it. As Caruana describes them, “Karen’s was epic, Mike’s was real-world, Chloe’s was children’s-story, and mine was dark and gloomy.”
They didn’t want to follow a libretto, but they still needed greater agreement on the narrative, partly in order to create program notes describing it. “So we all wrote in our own words how we felt the story of Aya went,” says Fisher Doyle. “We sent those in, we talked. Finally, last night, we came to our story as a complete team.”
But only after a series of “bouncing emails,” Gosney notes. “The story kept evolving — like your ideas were sneaking into my explanation, and vice versa.”
As for the ambiguous figure of Aya, they’re content to leave her open to interpretation.
When I ask Jensen who Aya is, everyone laughs and ribs her about answering this far-from-easy question. Jensen’s response? “I feel I’m a person, and the tree teaches me. It has the wisdom of … like the leaves go up into the heavens, the roots go deep underground, and the trunk goes solidly into the ground.”
Creating the choreography for both contemporary ballet and aerial dancers seems to have been less of a hassle than the story. Gosney explains why: “The dancers, in both companies, are very aggressive and want to be challenged.” However, the range of motion in the hips required for ballet exposes some dancers to injury, so he limited or eliminated the aerial work for them.
As for himself and Caruana as choreographers, Gosney says, “The challenge was to make us more aware of the air space. It helped expand my creativity for sure, gave me a whole new realm.” The trick, finally, has been to create the illusion of a single company even though one group will be mostly on the floor and the other in the air.
In general, ADC’s Jensen and Fisher Doyle — who “loves the moment when the air meets the ground” — aim for dancing on all levels, which at the Athenaeum will include the orchestra pit. As Jensen says, “We can create choreography airborne, create choreography on the ground, and anything in between.”
The most noticeable crossover dancers in “AYA” will be Caruana and Jensen, but as he notes, “We decided Chloe would be the true person to dance with both companies in this show.” In fact, after a year of intensive training with Elements, Jensen will be dancing on pointe for the first time in her life at the age of 38.
As the founder of ADC, Jensen has worked for the last 16 years primarily on establishing the company, she says. During that time, “I danced some, but my focus was always on teaching, training dancers, creating, producing, and building the infrastructure” — as you can imagine, the special needs of aerial dance are considerable — “and funding.”
Recently, she says, “I realized that I spent my ideal dancing years directing, without ever having had the chance to focus on my own dance career. This collaboration has been that opportunity.” For the role of Aya, she adds, “I’ve trained harder than I ever have in my life.”
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“AYA” is a dream realized in many ways, a true labor of love and act of faith for everyone embracing it.
Laura Molzahn is a freelance critic.
‘AYA, An Aerial Ballet’
When: 8 p.m. Saturday and Oct. 17
Where: Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport Ave.
Tickets: $22-$48 at 773-935-6875 or athenaeumtheatre.org