Showgirls, cabaret, oh my!
by Regina Hanson, The O’Shaughnessy
As part of a Women of Substance Dance Series collaboration between The O’Shaughnessy at St. Catherine University and Northrop Concerts and Lectures at the University of Minnesota, Rosie Herrera Dance Theatre will grace The O’Shaughnessy stage November, 29, .
The company will perform the pieces Dining Alone and Various Stages of Drowning: A Cabaret. Herrera’s work draws from a variety of performance genres, including modern dance, theater, and drag, which Herrera says is only true to herself.
“It would be completely unjust, or unlike me, to have anything but that variety, because that’s who I am,” Herrera said. “That’s what my background is.”
Of Cuban descent, Herrera, 30, says that she “(came) out of the womb dancing,” so dancing was always at the center of her family life. She got her performance start in street dance, and began dancing hip hop professionally at 15. At the same time, she also started working with drag queens and at a cabaret, infamously known as “the world’s shortest showgirl,” at five-foot-two. Herrera continued on to the University of Florida, where she took her first modern dance class, and discovered that “that was what (she) was supposed to be doing.”
Herrera was at the University of Florida for two years, then transferred to The New World School of the Arts conservatory, graduating with a BFA in Dance Performance. During her school years, Herrera also trained as a classical coloratura soprano. Herrera received criticism for continuing music lessons because, having not taken ballet from a young age, she was behind as a dancer. However, she felt that the music fed into the dancing and kept her focused.
“What music has taught me is about pitch,” Herrera said. “Understanding, knowing, and respecting pitch is something that can relate to you as a human, and as a performer in any way, because a C is a C no matter what. I think now in dance (with how far we’ve come), that sometimes it’s hard to recognize pitch. Also, classical music is just a passion of mine; it’s what I do for my heart.”
With such a varied background, Herrera’s company and choreography is just as diverse. For her own company, she pulled from the world she knew: the singer from the opera, the ballerina from school, and break-dancers and drag queens from her childhood.
“I pulled them all together, then I had a company,” Herrera said. “It wasn’t a conscious effort. I also felt that these people were really at the height of their individual performance genres, and there was so much that they could learn from each other and challenge each other in different ways.”
The two works that Herrera’s company will be performing at The O’Shaughnessy, Various Stages of Drowning: A Cabaret and Dining Alone, are as varied, vivid, and colorful as her company. Various Stages of Drowning: A Cabaret, was inspired by a series of dreams Herrera had over a six year period, connected in one way or another with the theme of water. Herrera calls the performance an attempt at recreating these dream states using water as a metaphor for the unconscious, putting it to stage and music.
Of Dining Alone, Herrera said she tries to work with subject matter, which she describes as anything that “gets (her) in the gut,” that is not immediately understandable on an intellectual level. For Herrera, the act of dining alone personified loneliness in a way she couldn’t understand; thus, Dining Alone was born.
“I grew up in a restaurant (my dad had), so I did watch people dine alone,” Herrera said. “For some reason, I always had this really strong empathetic reaction to watching people dine alone, particularly if they were older.”
Dining Alone is a deconstruction of the empathetic instinct and what relationships with food reveal about human character and the human condition. Herrera describes it as a look at the fragility of youth juxtaposed with the fragility of old age.
Herrera does not like to think of her work as being aimed at a specific audience because her objective is to dig deep. The deeper you dig, she said, “the more universal your message becomes.” However, as a Women of Substance event, Herrera feels that the young women and girls attending the performance of her work will be particularly moved. In Dining Alone, Herrera looks at the issues of how women of her generation and younger create Disney-inspired ideals of romance, some stereotypes of feminine behavior, and what those archetypes of femininity reveal about the human condition.
“I think that a lot of the work being put together and presented in the show deals with ideas of femininity in a strong way,” Herrera said. “Because I’m a woman and my perspective is more similar to theirs, I think there’s a lot of subject matter that would really intrigue (young women and girls) and that they can relate to. The idea of beauty, and what is beauty, romance, solitude, and classic ideas of femininity juxtaposed with modern ideas of femininity … are all present.”
Rosie Herrera Dance Theatre will perform at 7:30 p.m., Nov 29, at The O’Shaughnessy. Tickets are priced between $14 and $31, and may be purchased from The O’Shaughnessy at the ticket office, by phone at 651-690-6700, or online at oshaughnessy.stkate.edu/.
Check out this sneak peek video of the show on Northrop's YouTube channel.
