This production was scheduled June 1-2, 2024.
When, as a young child, we each discovered some aspect of nature—a leaf, a rock, a flower, or the squishy joy of mud—the pleasure inside bubbled forth as elation and wonder. It was our first mindful brush with the artistic magic that grows, flows, and blossoms in the wild.
We can rediscover that feeling on Saturday, June 1 and Sunday, June 2 at the Harold J. Miossi Cultural and Performing Arts Center at Cuesta College. Outside/In, a San Luis Obispo Movement Arts Center (SLOMAC) performance, is a collaboration between three local artists, choreographer Maartje Hermans, composer Brook Munro, and photographer Richard Fusillo, as well as their 80 dancers from ages 4 to 25.
The dancers come to life through Herman’s choreography, Munro’s music, and Fusillo’s images, all three elements coming together in one momentous movement.
After the first run of choreography, Hermans reports that one of the 8-year-old dancers said, “It felt like we were not separate dancers anymore but we moved and felt like one ocean together.”
According to Hermans, “That says everything!”
The integrated program is like a weaving of multiple dramatic elements with an emotional golden thread . . .”
Hermans has found a peace in nature that she wanted to share with her students and audiences: to teach them that once we feel the texture of a place in bare feet, sense the soft touch of wind against the skin, and listen to the sounds of ocean waves, our imagination then allows us to return to that calm and inspiration whenever we choose.
“It tunes me into what is present in the here and now,” Hermans says. “And from that place, movement comes by itself. No force, no mental blockages, no judgments. Freedom. To be and express where, what, and how you are. It also releases stress, and trauma. It’s like a flushing of the system kinda thing for me. After a dance like this, all is calmer and that way I can re-engage with the world and society.”
The integrated program is like a weaving of multiple dramatic elements with an emotional golden thread tying together movement, nature, music, and evocative images. To accomplish that, Hermans brought performers to several Central Coast locations to dance while Munro recorded the sounds of them interacting with the natural environment, and Fusillo photographed their movements. Munro then manipulated and integrated the sounds he gathered into original music.
Munro strikingly makes the intangibility of sound tangible as he shapes the acoustics of his surroundings into his original music—as he has done in previous work like Harvest in 12 Parts where he incorporated the real-life sounds of winemaking into his work. For Outside/In, nature offered the base track.
. . . a spectacularly original experience that captures the force of movement, the joy of childhood, and the work of three artists.”
“Music comes from everywhere, we just have to open our ears to it and respond,” Munro says. “My inspiration for the original music that I wrote for Outside/In most definitely came from the dancers’ own connection with the environments we workshopped.
“When we were on location, it was important for me to see how the dancers responded to the sights, sounds, and weather that surrounded them. They were happy, empowered, and free. Maartje does a wonderful job guiding them, becoming one as a unit, while still being able to express themselves as individuals. As the composer for the show, I felt it was my job to let those experiences spill into my studio and into the music I would write.”
During the performance, while the dancers move to Munro’s music, Fusillo’s photos are projected at a grand scale—a spectacularly original experience that captures the force of movement, the joy of childhood, and the work of three artists.
SLOMAC is a conservatory-style dance studio founded by Maartje Hermans and Ryan Lawrence to foster the same lifelong appreciation of dance that they experienced—first as students at top-level conservatories like Het National Ballet Academy of the Netherlands and The Juilliard School, and later as in-demand professional dancers.