Associate Professor of Dance Susan Levine Ourada and her professional dance company SLOdance will be performing the piece “Schizocosa” as part of UNL Associate Professor of Entomology Eileen Hebet’s “Eight-Legged Encounters” event and exhibition at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science on Sunday, Sept. 28.
The piece originated nearly five years ago with UNL dancers.
“I started chatting with Eileen Hebets, who is biology faculty and Garrett Hope, who was a doctoral candidate in music composition, about Hebets’ work with these schizocosa spiders,” Ourada said. “And how she just felt that their sounds and their movements would lend itself to dance and music.”
Ourada and her student dancers crafted the piece based on three areas of research.
“One, we watched videos of these spiders doing their mating dance, which was pretty interesting, and using our modern dance toolbox, we morphed movements so they didn’t look like spiders,” she said. “We also started reading the literature of spiders, and when I say that, I mean fairy tales and ‘Little Miss Muffet.’ And finally, I told them to imagine having a spider inside of you, on you and on top of you. Then, we just started moving and creating this eight-and-a-half minute dance.”
Hope (D.M.A. 2011) composed his music, and they started making the dance to move with the music.
“It really was a collaboration between the three areas,” Ourada said.
The piece premiered at the Kansas Dance Festival in 2010, but no one guessed that it was about spiders.
“Everybody thought it was a fascinating view of the life of a schizophrenic, and it had nothing to do with that,” Ourada said. “So we love not telling people what it’s about.”
She describes it as a “moody and somewhat mysterious piece,” since people don’t know what the title means, but she praises Hope’s music.
“The music is just so beautiful, and you’d never know it came from the sounds of the spiders because of the way Garrett manipulated that and layered it with other electronica,” Ourada said. “I’ve worked with him three times, but this is, by far, my favorite of his compositions with me.”
For the performances in Denver, there will be three dancers from SLO dance, including two UNL alums, Marisol Herling (B.A. 2014) and Beth Jensen (B.A. 2012), along with Ekida Laurie.
“There will be thousands of people,” Ourada said. “I think it’s going to be really surprising for my dancers to be face to face with people.”
They’ll be performing three times throughout the day in the southeast atrium of the museum. Ourada will also be performing a solo piece, “Through Mona’s Eyes,” at the University of Colorado in Boulder that day.
“It’s a very active weekend,” she said.
But she is thankful for the opportunity to perform “Schizocosa” as part of the exhibit.
“I’m very pleased that people are looking at dance and other arts as a way to enhance something scientific,” Ourada said. “So much emphasis is placed on STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics], so to know that the arts allow us to view science in a broader way is very encouraging.”