The Triangle

Mark Dendy

“I was so inspired by the Durham Performing Arts Center, by the architecture and the glass and this beaming building that is so stunning when it lights up at night,” Dendy says. “So I’m going to be setting up a ‘treasure hunt’ for movement and dance there.”

Outdoors, Dendy will use DPAC’s landscaping, stairs and the handrails in his dance. Indoors, he’ll use the staircases, the walls, hallways and spaces under the staircases. Dance will also take place in unexpected places like bathrooms and other hidden spots. “The audience can walk around all of these spaces for an hour and explore,” Dendy says. “It will become this living, breathing organism with dance.” The Golden Belt installation, in one room rather than the whole building, will take some of its inspiration from the site’s industrial past. “There were people in there working eight-hour shifts, doing unison movement to create products. So I’m going to pay homage to that in a way, and use some of the nooks and crannies in that room and also the stairs leading up to it.”

For Dendy, the appeal of site-specific work is that it breaks down “the proscenium/audience relationship.”

“In the origins of dance, there wasn’t a tribal box office with a place where the watchers sat and the performers performed,” he says. “It was all in a circle, and there were ritual dances for rain, for crop fertility, for sexual fertility, or for power to go to war—all of these things were danced about. Somewhere along the way it became diversion and entertainment, but modern dance kind of brought purpose and meaning back to it. So it’s a celebration of that, a celebration of the space, and a celebration of the incredible, beautiful dancers that come to ADF every summer as well as the community dancers from the Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill areas.”

Dendy says his Video Blog on the ADF Web site will be “the go-to place to find an interview with a choreographer or a dancer coming into town, to follow a day in the life of a student, and to watch people making dances for the camera every day. People can watch clips about specific dances, dancers or choreographers, and decide what they’re going to see that week.”

A student himself at ADF in 1981 and 1983, Dendy says it had one of the biggest influences on his career. “As (ADF Director) Charles Reinhart is fond of saying, in the 18th and 19th centuries it was an era of music, and people were living in the time of Mozart and Beethoven. Today, it’s an era of dance and we’re living in it. Modern dance is of the 20th century and the 21st century. It’s a vibrant art form that’s happening right now, and being created right now. To be part of that, as an audience member or as a dancer, is kind of a great thing.”