Collaborations
Collaboration lies at the heart of our work. Bands, presenters. individual artists, dance and theater companies—all have provided inspiration and partnership in the creation of a vast and varied repertoire.
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As part of Viva Victoria! week, celebrating the major renovation and reopening of the Victoria Theatre in downtown Dayton, Cityfolk presented Rhythm in Shoes and The Horse Flies. An old-time band gone electric, The Horse Flies created the perfect sonic backdrop for Sharon Leahy’s innovative choreography. With roots in the same fertile ground of American traditional music and dance, the results were a revelation to an astonished audience. So successful was this collaboration, it was revisited in 1992 with the addition of several new pieces. |
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Tap legend, teacher and director of the American Tap Dance Orchestra, Brenda Bufalino was an early mentor of Sharon’s in New York City. Commissioned by RIS for a piece of choreography, Ms. Bufalino chose for her music Hoagy Carmichael’s The Old Music Master. She shared the Victoria stage with us that same year. |
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Looking once again to the old-time music community, we brought together other fellow visionaries who were rooted in tradition but striving to create something new as well. Musicians Chad Crum, Pete Sutherland and Lee Blackwell were added to the band with hoofer Ira Bernstein and dozens of volunteers from each community augmenting the dancers. Commissioned by Cityfolk, Jacob’s Pillow and the Flynn Theater, Streets of the Capitol emerged as a work of profound depth, featuring music newly created by the assembled ensemble. Also included was All the Houses, Chad Crum’s enigmatically hip composition for solo fiddle and spoken word. |
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John Giffen, choreographer, performer and Ohio State University dance faculty member, creates deeply moving work both humorous and poignant. When commissioned by RIS for a piece of choreography, he delivered the beguiling One if by Land. |
Michael Bashaw & Puzzle of Light – 1997
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Musician and sculptor, Michael Bashaw and his Puzzle of Light ensemble worked with RIS from the ground up, recreating a world where the Goddess ruled in Do You Remember This? To honor the memory of women who were burned for their knowledge, both literally and figuratively, Michael made the Memory Boat. Starting with a metal bowl, seven feet in diameter, the dancers added a mast and arms, creating a Maypole to weave and unweave. The arms were then hung with gourds, bells and drums. Water carriers filled the gourds, which emptied onto the drums. Musicians played hypnotic rhythms on every surface of the sculpture. The dancers grew in number, multiplied by the participation of over thirty women from the community. It was theater as ritual and it celebrated the old world while promising a new one where the wisdom of the Goddess could live again. |
Human Race Theater Company
The Last Song of John Proffit – 1998
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Playwright Tommy Thompson was, for more than twenty years, the banjo player for the Red Clay Ramblers of North Carolina—one of the most successful old-time string bands of the last half of the twentieth century. His experience in theater began with the off-Broadway hit Diamond Studs and continued through his work with Sam Shepherd in A Lie of the Mind. Tommy wrote and performed The Last Song of John Proffit, saying he knew of only one other person who could play the role, and that was his friend, Rick Good. Like John Proffit and Tommy Thompson, Rick has spent much of his life on the road, making a living as a banjo player. He first performed The Last Song of John Proffit for the Mad River Theater Works of West Liberty, Ohio, in their 1986 production, directed by Jeff Hooper. Rhythm in Shoes remounted the play in collaboration with the the Human Race Theater Company with direction by Bruce Cromer. Thompson’s writing and Good’s acting are first-rate. The performer is able to shift in and out of music making without visible effort… his characterizations are richly detailed and totally transporting. An intensely emotional experience. There was no escaping Rick Good’s remarkable magnetism. Good’s multifaceted talent and easy, even nonchalant manner belie the effort of what must be an exhausting one-man performance. Good’s John Proffit, in short, is the essence of American Iliterature of the nineteenth century.
The roots of Rhythm in Shoes grow deep in the ground of American tradition, particularly the banjo and fiddle music of the rural South. Relatively speaking however, the United States is young country whose traditions go back only a few hundred years. Before that they are rightfully the fruits of other cultures. In the case of Old Time American music, it is the merging of the African banjo with the repertoire of Irish fiddle and pipe tunes that begat something now considered uniquely American. Through the development of this music, one can trace the history of blacks and whites as it both collided and united in the cultural fusion that so energizes our society. One of the most successful artistic renderings of this phenomenon is Tommy Thompson’s play The Last Song of John Proffit. Set nearly 100 years ago it is the story of an old man who once performed with the legendary minstrel Dan Emmet, the man to whom history attributes the authorship of Dixie, the anthem of the South. As the story unfolds, we travel the winding path of John Proffit’s personal history, learning the dark truth about Dixie and America’s music. At the center of the drama is the banjo—on the surface, as American as apple pie—in reality, an ultimately disowned instrument of the African slave. The audience experiences both the attraction and the revulsion of early American minstrelsy through the humor and horror of the old man’s stories. |
Keith Terry & Crosspulse – 1999
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Earlier in the decade we happened to share a concert at Cain Park in Cleveland with body percussionist Keith Terry. There was an immediate compatibility that led to Abel & Cain, a pairing of Keith’s body rhythm choreography with Rick Good’s original song. A few years later, a major collaboration with Keith’s group, Crosspulse yielded Time Shifts.
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Some people don’t get it, a blind private eye, but I can taste a bitter lie, feel a shaky alibi, hear the whispered tales behind the secret lives you lead. You think there’s something there because you see it. You think there’s nothing there because you don’t. You think if you look like it, you can be it. Well, you won’t. They say ninety percent of the entire universe is something you cannot see. That makes everybody, everywhere near as blind as me. Beyond that far event horizon there is so much more than meets the eyes and the world as we know it shatters. As above, so below. Always ask someone who knows when it comes to these dark matters.
Nova Town is an inner city neighborhood gone to seed. Its residents are the hasbeens and wanna be’s whose lives have passed them by. Nova Town is dancing: tap and swing, music: jazz and blues, and physics: astro and meta, all rolled into an original theater production with shades of film noir, beat poetry and sci-fi. Through the interactions of a lovable loser, a worn out bar maid, a doubtful deacon, a blind private eye, a crooked cop and an extra-terrestrial agent of the powers that be, we learn how connected and critical we are to the great mysteries of the Universe, in spite of our inability to comprehend it all.
Written by Rick Good, Nova Town had its world premiere on September 29 and 30th, 2000, at the Victoria Theatre. It was a collaboration between the musicians and dancers of Rhythm in Shoes and five of Dayton’s finest actors: Bruce Cromer, Michael Lippert, Jay Pearce, Sheila Ramsey and Michelle Zimmerman. The Further Sayings of Frank Galileo The weak force is a dark horse, champion of time and space. You can’t win, you can’t tie and you can’t get out of the race. It’s Singularity into the homestretch, like a shadow in the night; anything but weak now, with the finish line in sight. The tip sheet says infinity but I put mine on gravity. For it’s the shadow we cannot see that gives shape to the light. The stars don’t shine in Nova Town. They’re burnt, they’re spent, they’re behind on their rent. Call it gravity, call it regret. In any case, an unrelenting descent; faster than the speed of light, faster even than the forgetting of a dream. No, no, Nova Town. You’ve heard of a black hole, this one’s more like a deep, There’s only so much of creation a creature can conceive and that, my friends, is plain to see. But those with keener sight believe, while skeptics slept and mystics wept, they did perceive and they did accept the blinding, dark matters of heart that kept us all from flying apart. The Heavenly Dome could never hold it together with only the stars that shine. The veiled rest with which we’re blessed is Sympathy Divine. Some people don’t get it, but there is a difference between a blind man who dreams he can see, and one who sees in his dreams. From the Dialogues of Dusty & Galileo DUSTY: You are very far from the center of things here Frank. GALILEO: I suspected that too… Who are you? DUSTY: My specialty is Human Evolution, anything from astrophysics to zoanthropy. My last assignment simply required me to damage a mirror. GALILEO: That’s not bad luck where you come from? DUSTY: Where I come, there’s neither luck, nor bad… I didn’t actually break the mirror, I just made sure it didn’t work well enough for anyone to think there was something there because they saw it. GALILEO: Moonbugs. DUSTY: Moonbugs? GALILEO: An astronomer named Pickering, back in the twenties, very respected in his time, spent the last fourteen years of his life believing he’d seen bugs swarming on the moon. Just shadows, really. DUSTY: Moonbugs. GALILEO: You know they fixed that mirror. DUSTY: I knew they would… The bugs were gone by then. GALILEO: Now they think there’s nothing there… DUSTY: … because they don’t see it. GALILEO: Dark Matter. DUSTY: We don’t call it dark matter but you’re right, it actually does account for more than ninety percent of the Universe as you know it… But you’re thinking only of distant space. Would it not also be present all around us? For instance, your entire physical being is encoded in only ten percent of your DNA, and everyone knows that more than ninety percent of the human brain is a complete mystery. GALILEO: Grey matter. DUSTY: The unseen fabric of space is like the surface of a river, shaped by everything over which it flows. We all have our own specific gravity, everything does, not just planets and stars; our own peculiar way of shaping and being shaped by whatever we pull in and whatever tugs on us. GALILEO: I could always feel the gravity… Now I know what a river looks like. DUSTY: You see what I’m saying. GALILEO: Just one thing… what is zoanthropy? DUSTY: A mental disorder in which the patient imagines himself to be a beast.
Interview with the Author reprinted with permission from the Fall, 2014 issue of UP & DOWN: the Journal of Astrophysics & Blues Up & Down: When and how did Nova Town begin? Rick Good: Nova Town began sometime in the early 1980’s as a growing collection of songs I was writing in a bluesy, swing style. Early on, Sharon (Leahy) and I began working out harmonies to some of them. Eventually, her choreography took the music to a new level. She turned the title song into an exquisite tap ballet. It became an important part of the Rhythm in Shoes repertoire and we were both convinced that someday the material would develop into a full-length music, dance and theater piece. As it continued to evolved, the underlying theme that human experience is mirrored in the heavens literally possessed me and I read everything I could understand and more about modern astronomy. U&D Talk about the process. The work of bringing it all together? RG: It was tricky. But it was also clear to me that here was a colorful place, peopled with fascinating characters and fueled by a universally appealing metaphor. The ingredients were all there. It simmered on the back burner for a long time but I always had at least one eye on it. The creative process can move very slowly, even to the point of apparent standstill, but it’s a beautiful and mysterious thing and perseverance always pays off. The upside of taking a long time was our company’s growing reputation for doing good work and the friendships we developed with local artists. By the time a script was coming together, we were able to collaborate with some of the best actors in the area. Another key was Sharon’s decision to direct the entire production. Her choreographic skills informed the whole process.
U&D So, you wrote the script and music and Sharon choreographed and directed. RG: Yeah, it was exhilarating, mind-expanding and, at times, terrifying. I learned that writing words on paper and having what pretends to be a finished script puts the piece maybe halfway there. A director’s vision can require some radical changes. Plus, an actor can take a character to places the writer never imagined. U&D Give an example of something that changed in the direction. RG: I’d written a scene for the ghost of the crooked cop and the blind private eye (Officer Brown and Frank Galileo). The dialogue centered around Brown’s remorse and Galileo’s judgment that it was too late, that there’s no coming back and saying your sorry. I had Galileo tossing Brown’s pocket watch to him and it being too heavy for him to hold. I liked the dialogue and I thought it could work as a scene. Sharon’s idea had all the characters passing the watch, one to another, while the ghost, who none of them could see, was trying in vain to get ahold of it. It was wordless choreography but it showed the same things I had written in a more theatrical way. It can be hard to let go at first but you learn to do what works. Plus, I noticed early on that issues raised by the Director were, more often than not, the same things that were still nagging at me. U&D Like what, for instance? RG: Originally, I had the crooked cop being killed by a gun. Later, the same rifle was used by Galileo to shoot out the lights of Nova Town so all his friends could see real stars in the sky. I was always a little… I don’t know, uncomfortable may be too strong a word but something about guns in a cultural sense made me doubt whether I wanted to use one. I never said anything about it until Sharon voiced a similar feeling. U&D And what became of gun? RG: We didn’t need it. Sharon suggested we use a shovel as the fatal weapon because there was already one on stage. I warmed up to the idea and one day brought a slingshot to rehearsal so Galileo could still shoot out the lights. It all worked very well, much better than a gun would have. Plus, Spats gets to holler, “Blind man with a slingshot!” U&D Is Nova Town based on a real place? RG: No concrete location but I grew up in Dayton (Ohio).That’s the city I know best so it would probably influence the geography and atmosphere of any urban setting I would fictionalize. I’ve been told by other Daytonians that there’s a resonance. Think of it as an inner city neighborhood gone to seed. For the residents of Nova Town, it’s mostly a state of mind.
U&D Who are the residents? RG: All the hasbeens and the wanna be’s whose lives have passed them by. They all have their stories that are more or less true, their excuses that are more or less legitimate. I call them the Strivers. They have a right to sing the blues and that’s what they do. They sing, they dance, they care about each other. That’s why they’re Strivers. The character, Dusty says Nova Town and the people in it are “very far from the center of things.” To me this means that the chance things in general are going to go well are very slim. Once you realize and accept that the odds are stacked against you, you learn to take what joy you do find. U&D Tell us about Dusty. RG: Special Agent Stardust is not from around here. She comes from “a world apart” and adds the science to the fiction. Think of her in mythological terms. When you consider that the human race is both intelligent enough to harness nuclear energy and stupid enough to misuse it, a benevolent race of higher beings that keeps an eye on the bigger picture is a comforting idea. Dusty is an emissary from the Powers that Be. She’s sent to Earth whenever it’s necessary to intercede in human affairs for the general maintenance of the Universe. U&D She speaks of damaging a mirror on a prior assignment. RG: It’s what NASA referred to as the “spherical aberration” in the main reflector of the Hubble Space Telescope. There was a period of time, before that remarkable in-space repair job, that the Hubble was unable to focus clearly because the main mirror was flawed. I considered the possibility that it was not an accident, that there was something up there that someone didn’t want us to see. U&D Such as? RG: A wormhole, for instance. It’s right out of Star Trek but not without precedent in real life, at least not theoretically speaking. Scientists speculate that these tunnel-like structures could spontaneously appear and disappear, linking one area of space to another; a short cut to someplace light years away. Let’s say there was a wormhole all set to materialize right where a fully-functioning Hubble could have seen it. Let’s say scientists would have thought they understood what it was and let’s say they’d have been wrong. People can do a lot of damage when they think they understand something they don’t. U&D So the Powers that Be interceded. RG: Presumably to avoid some cosmic catastrophe. They sent Dusty down to sabotage the mirror, knowing all the while it’ll eventually be repaired. But not until the wormhole is gone. U&D Why is she sent back and why to Nova Town? RG: Within this same mythology, the Universe depends on Earth to play a part in the transformation of energies. The role of humankind centers around our evolving consciousness, specifically our ability to learn to perceive objective reality and the higher forms of energy that are created when we do. Most of us get stuck. We sleepwalk through life. Shocks from the outside are necessary to get us to the next level. Dusty comes to Nova Town because the Powers that Be have seen an opportunity to jump start several stalled lives at one time. U&D How does she do this? RG: She orchestrates a conspiracy of events that transforms the lives of some of the Strivers. U&D Tell us about them. RG: There’s Kitty McTell, the feisty manager of the local Waterin’ Hole. Long ago, she had a promising career as a dancer but she believes the despicable Officer Brown ruined it all. Brown is a crooked cop who dominates the town’s underworld. He’s used to having his way and he’s made a lot of enemies. Brown’s been tipped off that somebody’s about to rat him out and he’s pretty sure it’s Spats. Spats is a typical hard luck local, the eternal optimist on a never-ending losing streak. He works for Kitty at the Waterin’ Hole and does odd jobs around the neighborhood. It’s his gambling habit that ties him to Brown. Spats is also helping the new minister, Deacon Jones, renovate one of the neighborhood’s many worn out buildings.
Jones is the type who’s all head and no heart. He’s yet to have a true religious experience and he’s come to Nova Town to make one last effort to build a congregation. Last, but not least, is Frank Galileo: poet, philosopher and blind private eye. His lack of sight is no handicap. In fact, Dusty finds in Galileo a uniquely awakened spirit in whom she can confide. Nobody but the blind man even senses her presence. U&D It’s hard to imagine what someone who hasn’t actually seen Nova Town would make of all this. RG: All I can say is come see for yourself.
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Dayton Contemporary Dance Company - 2000 & 2001
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Billed as Rhythm in 2’s - DCDC and Shoes, our collaboration with Dayton Contemporary Dance Company paired two nationally-acclaimed dance companies for unforgettable evenings of concert dance that brought audiences to their feet with shouts of Bravo and Encore.
The first year included Walk With Me, Sharon Leahy’s choreographic tribute to DCDC founder, Jeraldyne Blunden. The following year featured Hoagland, a suite of dances co-created by Sharon and DCDC artistic director Kevin Ward to the immortal songs of Hoagy Carmichael.
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The Red Clay Ramblers – Rambleshoe - 2003
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Still to come, plenty of great photos by Andy Snow.
Long times pals, the Red Clay Ramblers of North Carolina occupied the top of our list as desirable collaborators since our beginnings. Their award winning work in theater was inspiring and right up our alley. We knew we were rambling at our own risk and rascalism indeed ran rampant with the creation of Rambleshoe.
The crossover of Celtic music and clogging, wailing Gospel and Mardi Gras marches is engaging and addictive… The ensemble’s top hat and cane finale is worth the price of admission alone. Everyone who saw the lively and inventive collaboration between Rhythm in Shoes and the Red Clay Ramblers was in the realm of the versatile virtuoso. No one in the twelve member cast of dancers, singers and musicians wore just a single hat. The performance was stellar – the mixture of dance, music, humor and sensitivity kept the show continually fresh and intriguing. It was great to see the audience engaged and applauding so much - they truly enjoyed the performance and the standing ovation made it evident that they appreciated your creativity and energy. Personally, I feel that you’ve created a program perfect for all ages.
Rambleshoe follows the fancy feet and a fool’s feats to a brand new Dixieland hoedown as our two seasoned companies set the stage on its head. Using both traditional and original forms of music |
