Not every dance artist finds his calling at age five, though sometimes it seems that way. Jonathan Meyer says he was “not a particularly physical kid.” He wanted to be a writer—right up until he started at Oberlin College and danced for the first time. “I felt an immediacy,” recalls the 38-year-old founder and artistic director of Khecari Dance Theatre. “And everything else felt like a translation.”
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Today Meyer describes his choreography as “crazy and kinetic and flipping around.” Under the influence of contact improv, he gravitates toward “being upside down and using all parts of the body.” He took not only physical but emotional risks in last fall’s haunting trio, The Waking Room. Originating in his “curiosity about the workings of the mind in psychosis,” that piece created a terrifying yet recognizable world defined by the dancers’ apparently involuntary, compulsive motions.
Meyer will be performing in Antonick’s new piece focused on duets this fall. If he had the resources, he says, he’d expand the “action/reaction thing” of duets into a piece for 30 or 40 dancers. “It would be a kaleidoscope with that many bodies! Of course, it could be like a bad Busby Berkeley rip-off.”
1306—Ten Years Later Meyer and Antonick perform excerpts from their jointly choreographed Tacit, Sat 9/25, 7 PM, Dance Center of Columbia College, 1306 S. Michigan, colum.edu/dance_center.
