On November 16th and 17th, at CounterPULSE in San Francisco, choreographers and dancers Holly Shaw, Mira Betz, and Hannah Romanowsky will debut "Eve's Elixir", a show that blends and transforms world dance traditions into an innovative, contemporary performance. We recently had the opportunity to sit down with this talented trio to talk about their show:

David: So how did this show come about? What led you to put it together?

Holly: The reason we're putting on this show is that we wanted to have a platform to do the things that we want to do. We usually have all these expectations put on us as performers of ethnic dance, and I think they hold us back. There aren't many places to do innovation in traditional dance in the Bay Area -- people have their little orbits and spheres, they're doing the real traditional thing and everybody's trying to get it just right. There is innovation, but there's not always a place to do it. I think that's what art is about -- expressing the things you don't see in the world that need to be expressed.

Hannah: When you're doing cultural dance, in particular, there's a certain framework in which the dance is expressed, and you're tied into that framework, playing a role, a particular character. It's a wonderful experience, and it's important to understand that as much as you can before breaking away from it. We all respect the forms of dance we do and the cultures they come from, the artistic cultures, very much.

David: But you do find the roles confining at times?

Hannah: As much as I love it, it's not necessarily me -- it's a way to access and explore a particular part of me. People can argue the point, but it's hard to do a form from a different culture unless you're completely embedded in it and have dedicated your life to it. Furthermore, dance is a language that speaks to a particular audience, and the audience from which a particular dance has grown out of is a different audience than our audience here in the Bay Area. It's important to connect to our audience, and ourselves in the process. So I think this show is a very freeing experience, because it gives us the opportunity to access ourselves and draw our various skills and talents together to create something uniquely ours.

Mira: Myself, I'm one of a number of dancers who are on the same quest: to take Middle Eastern dance and 'make it their own.' I'm particularly drawn to doing this project and dancing with these two because the three of us have studied these forms of dance for a substantial length of time, and understand the foundations of the dance that we're taking from before we change them with and through our own vices and devices. So it's not just pillaging these cultures, but understanding and knowing and loving these cultures and their dances, and then taking them to the next level as we filter them through ourselves. We're coming from a place of understanding and respect, rather than pillage.

Holly: We're not trying to create a whole new dance form. We're not saying, this piece I'm doing is going to create a whole new dance form, and I'm going to call it...American Flajazz! We're not trying to create a whole new fusion style. I'm not asking anybody to dance like me. I've been very lucky in that I've met these two women who can dance outside the box, and who have the ability to stretch themselves to dance in different ways. This is just us doing exactly what we want, with nobody telling us, 'well, we want you to be wearing polka dots, and a flower in your hair', or 'you must be this fantasy image with a fake ponytail, and be looking like a little Arabian I Dream of Jeannie--'

Hannah: Why are you looking at me?
[laughter]

David: How did the three of you end up working together?

Holly: The three of us worked together on a project called "The Flame and the Shadow", a folkloric ballet by Tim Rayborn, and for that we were given a piece of music that was unlike any other piece of music anybody had asked to do anything to before. It was really difficult, actually, because it wasn't straight Middle Eastern music--

Mira: It was cinematic.

Holly: --it was cinematic, so we were forced out of our comfort zone and had to come up with and combine different ideas that would fit the music. It was like a writing exercise where you can only use certain words or certain sounds, or you have to use only adjectives pertaining to swimming or something like that. We came up with something that was very abstract, but still worked well -- we were just watching a video of it earlier today, actually. So we really hit it off, and we have a good creative groove among the three of us, so I decided I wanted to do this project with them.

David: What are your backgrounds in ethnic/cultural dance?

Hannah: I grew up on stage -- I've been performing since I was about 6, and grew up doing a lot of musical theatre. I trained in ballet, jazz, tap... all that good stuff. I always loved to dance, but I had no clue that there were other options out there in the world, I wasn't exposed to them until I was almost 20. I feel lucky to have grown up here and to have had the opportunity of studying with a lot of wonderful master teachers in the Bay Area -- I think a lot of people aren't aware what a mecca for ethnic dance the Bay Area is. I've studied flamenco, classical Persian dance, North Indian, Central Asia, North African, Near Eastern, Middle Eastern, Romany...sometimes I just say, "I do dances from North Africa to Central Asia", rather than trying to list them all. I also studied at San Francisco State and received a degree in dance ethnology and world music, which is important, because it means we know what we're doing [laughs] -- you guys can ride on my coattails--

David: Ah, now we know who the brains of the outfit is, huh?

Holly: OK, I would like to say something--

David: Rebuttal?
[laughter]

Mira: I started in modern dance...well, I started in ballet, and lasted about four days, because it was tremendously boring. I wanted to be leaping across the room right away, so I quit and went to modern. In modern you could immediately start jumping across the room and leaping and spinning, and that's what I wanted to be doing. I grew up in a place that didn't have much more than two types of ethnic culture -- American Indian and American Hispanic, and maybe a little bit of white hippie culture -- nothing else. Then I moved to San Francisco when I was about 13, and started working at this concert series in San Rafael, where I saw the master percussionist Zakir Hussain, and then some bellydance. It blew my mind; I couldn't believe anything like that existed in the whole wide world, so I started studying bellydance, or Middle Eastern dance, and I ran around looking for all the teachers I could, until I found someone, Katarina Burda, who I really connected with. She gave us a wealth of knowledge, teaching us ethnic forms of dance true to form and culture and music and costume--

Hannah: She's a wonderful teacher.

Mira: She's amazing. I studied with her for over ten years.

Hannah: I saw Mira perform when we were teenagers -- that was an important element in opening up the whole world of cultural dance to me. I started taking lessons from Katarina, and it was a full experience -- in addition to learning the dances, we also sewed our costumes and learned the songs, as traditional dancers used to do. Being able to dance with women of all different ages was a very important and powerful experience. I had done competitive dancing when I was young, so this was a very different approach from what I was used to. This was dance and music as a form of socializing and community cohesion.

Holly: I grew up studying tap, jazz, ballet, and modern dance, and went on to study modern dance at Jordan College of Fine Arts at Butler University. Like Hannah, I also grew up in the theatre, acting in plays and musicals, as well as some film as a teenager. In college, I became interested in different styles of dance from around the world, specifically Middle Eastern and flamenco, and later Balinese, and after college I travelled extensively through Europe, Egypt, and Indonesia in order to study and perform these styles of dance. Since moving to the Bay Area, I've been continuously studying flamenco, working mostly with the amazing Yaelisa, as well as with visiting artists from Spain such as Belen Maya and Juan Ogalla.

David: How does flamenco figure into the show? It sounds like you're drawing on a number of different styles.

Holly: When trying to do something innovative that involves flamenco in the Bay Area, you almost don't want to use the word 'flamenco', because there's a very high bar for flamenco in the Bay Area, and people take it extremely seriously. I think that's great, but anybody that's an aficionado of flamenco should know that they're not coming to see a flamenco show per se; but they are coming to see a show that has some interesting flamenco elements to it. For example, I'll be doing a piece called "Palo", a taconeo por bulerias, with a cane -- you just don't see the cane used that much these days -- and while it is very flamenco, some of the body movements are drawn from tap.

David: What styles other than flamenco are you using?

Holly: There are elements of contemporary dance, Middle Eastern dance, Persian, vaudevillian, salsa, samba, Turkish Romany blended with Fosse-style jazz -- which, might I add, is one of my favorite pieces in the show -- ballet, tap, jazz...

Hannah: The styles that we draw from in the show, they're cousin dances, they're sister dances, so I think there are a lot of elements in Persian dance, and in Middle Eastern dance, that a fan of flamenco can appreciate, and vice versa. They have interlocking histories and traditions and influences, so they meld very well together.

Hannah: One thing that attracted me so much to these cultural art forms is the fact that they're experienced in a very personal environment. It's not like going to the theatre, where the dancers are way up on the stage and beyond reach. A lot of these cultural forms that we do traditionally take place in smaller settings, where the audience is part of the whole scene; there isn't that wall between the dancer and the audience.

David: What kind of reactions do you get from the different communities that are the sources of these styles?

Mira: I get a lot of positive response from the actual community members when I go into their community -- they're amazed that I'm not from their community because of the authenticity that they find in the dancing. But underlying it all I do have a sense of, you'll never fit in, you'll never be from that culture -- a 'you don't understand it like they do' type of thing, no matter how well-realized your technique is. That's prevalent all over, but I think it's because those communities have been pillaged in the past, so they're trying to hold onto their own. I have mixed feelings about it. In some ways I feel like it's a good thing that they're trying to keep that purity, but also I feel like it's a bad thing, because meanwhile the dance is vastly improving and accelerating in directions that are very exciting, and they're being left behind.

David: How are the individual dances coming together as you put your own twist on these traditional forms?

Holly: Well, for example, Hannah and I are doing a piece called "Honeysuckle Rose", set to the music of Ella Fitzgerald. I grew up listening to Ella, so when I dance to her now, with the vocabulary of flamenco in me, I find that the two styles fit really well -- this sort of jazzy, rhythmically interesting number combined with the attitude and weighty movements of flamenco. But as we were workshopping the piece, Mira commented that the movements were a little bit too heavy and stark for the lively, happy jazz element of Ella Fitzgerald. So we started watching old movies, old musicals, with all these amazing tap numbers, and we really got into it- - Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, the classics -- and we've incorporated a lot of those tap movements into the piece. In fact, the whole show has been influenced by these old movies -- maybe not every single piece, but a lot of them have a sort of nostalgic feeling to them. Which is funny -- here we are setting off to do something brand new, and contemporary, and innovative, and, um...it has the feeling of an old movie! [laughs]

Hannah: There's a reason why those movies are classics, why things stand the test of time -- because they work, and they're good, and they're there for us to take inspiration from.

Holly: Each piece is unique. There's one that Mira's going to be doing that I think is really special...[to Mira]...is it OK if I mention it? Mira's going to be doing a dance where she's dancing to her heartbeat. Listening to your own heartbeat, that's a very vulnerable thing -- it really underlines your mortality. I find it kind of frightening when I catch the sound, lying in bed or something--

Mira: Sharing that with an audience is like letting them into the innermost sanctum of your being; it literally is letting them into your body.

Holly: You can go on thinking about how you're dancing from the heart, you're dancing to your own beat... it underlines the whole motif of this show, which is...well, honesty.

Hannah: It's a very personal, felt experience.

Mira: We come at these forms in our time, and although we take inspiration from them, we're reliving them through our own generation's experience -- this barrage of culture and commercialism and war and peace, very intense and sometimes dark and sometimes happy, and very extreme in both senses.

Hannah: What you're talking about, and what I think the show's about, is accessing ourselves as artists, as women -- our personal potency.

All: Ooooh.

Mira: Women are personally potent?

Hannah: You bet! Every human being is personally potent.

--David Horwich