‘Dancing Out the Dust’ performance to hit the Rochester Public Market | Choice Events

A troupe of 26 dancers will descend upon the Rochester Community Marketplace this weekend, but at first, viewers might not know they’re witnessing a efficiency.

Dressed in black and flesh-toned hues, duos and trios of dancers will be stationed all over the outdoor places of the marketplace, periodically transferring in unison, then traveling, with times of stillness and improvisation between choreography and vacation.

When you see the dancers, comply with them, states the event’s artistic director, choreographer and dancer Erika Ruegemer.

Pied Piper-like, the troupe members will direct their curious audience, little by little and from lots of instructions, to converge and witness the whole group conduct jointly outside of The Yards Collective. Afterward, viewers will be invited to be part of the dancers at The Yards to collaborate on a freeform wall artwork undertaking.

The efficiency, “Dancing Out the Dust,” will acquire location twice on Saturday, Aug. 28, at ten a.m. and again at midday.

The dance’s title is drawn from a quote attributed to Pablo Picasso: “Art washes from the soul the dust of daily life.”

“We will specific the vulnerability and elegance of currently being human in a time when community care and partnership are extra important than ever for our collective therapeutic and growth,” Ruegemer wrote in the event’s description. “Together we can select to increase up and dance out of the dust.”

“For me, ‘Dancing Off the Dust’ is like shaking off what we’ve been sitting down in for so long,” Ruegemer states, adding that the dance is about relationship, and our continuous have to have for it.

“I usually think I can do so a lot on my possess,” she states. “And all through the pandemic, in particular, living on my possess for a long time, seeking to operate a organization, determining to transfer across the region — personally I have regarded that I have to have men and women.”

This Saturday’s efficiency of “Dancing Out the Dust” and the comply with up performances all through Rochester Fringe provide as Ruegemer’s farewell to Rochester, just before she moves back to her hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Soon after expending just about 14 a long time in Rochester, in which she skilled and executed with quite a few neighborhood dance providers which includes Thrust Physical Theatre, FuturPointe Dance, Flower Town Ballet, and Frazee Ft Dance, and launched Rochester Dance Theatre, Ruegemer has made a decision it is time.

Minneapolis is property, in which she realized to dance, studied with a variety of choreographers, and launched 1 Dance Enterprise, which for a time existed in each Minneapolis and Rochester.

But her factors for returning also have to do also with observing how she can be practical to a community in pain.

Ruegemer states she went property in the months quickly after George Floyd was killed by law enforcement officers, and that she was struck by the scene.

“I just experienced to be there,” she states. “And when I was there, I just stored saying yet another week, yet another week.”

She states above the a long time, each time good friends would inquire when she was preparing to transfer back to Minnesota, she would constantly convey to them, “I’ll know when I know.”

The fallout from Floyd’s death felt like that contact to property, she states.

“I feel the metropolis hurting,” she states. “And I know that that goes on everywhere you go. But there is certainly a attract for me to be there, and it’s possible to deliver the items that I’ve practiced and accomplished and given to this community, and to see in which they in good shape there. I want to go and hear to what is essential in the community.”

But just before that, a single last dance for Rochester.

When the dancers converge outside of The Yards, count on some intensity that displays the collective trauma of the previous 18 months.

“​​I did not want it to just be really, I desired it to be — not mad, but like, stomping on the head of evil,” she states. “To me, that is kind of what it is, dancing right on it and shaking up or transferring out that dust, and saying ‘NO’.”

Ruegemer states that the strategies behind “Dancing Out the Dust” were being the subjects of dialogue between herself and two regular collaborators, Elyssia Primus and Amanda Turk, who are the inventive workforce for this undertaking. “Especially all through this time in the world with so a lot division in so lots of means,” Ruegemer states. “We definitely have to select to arrive jointly to make adjust, to make items greater, to make guaranteed everybody’s ok, to make guaranteed everybody’s having care of.”

She states the piece is “almost like the notion of the phoenix growing up and starting anew, but also recognizing what is actually there and what is actually been there. And what we have to have to reconcile and make greater, deal with and apologize. All the unique layers of it. And that we have to have every other to do that.”

If the description of the efficiency appears significantly less like a official dance piece than an avant-garde efficiency that could baffle some unwitting audience members, perfectly, it form of is. Through her a long time choreographing and undertaking dance in Rochester, Ruegemer has been as very likely to develop is effective, usually in collaboration with musicians and visual artists, that erupt in a variety of metropolis configurations and acquire location in and all over crowds, as she has on a phase with a crystal clear separation from the audience.

According to her artist assertion, Ruegemer’s specialty is “creating non permanent worlds in just vacant spaces or presently current environments with no crystal clear division between the audience and the artists.”

A previous efficiency in this vein was, “Scene & Herd: A Carnival of Animals,” which was executed along East Ave. and Scio St. all through the Rochester Jazz Pageant in 2012. Ruegemer and members of 1 Dance Co. wore makeup and bits of costuming to resemble unique animals and executed by weaving through the crowds, leaping as gracefully as deer, climbing buildings, and pantomiming other members of the animal kingdom.

Held in collaboration with The Yards, “Dancing Out the Dust” will acquire location at the Rochester Community Marketplace on Saturday, Aug. 28, at ten a.m. and midday. Free of charge and family members-welcoming.

“Dancing Out the Dust” will be recurring in September, as section of the 2021 Rochester Fringe lineup. In collaboration with Rochester Modern Artwork Centre, the efficiency will transfer to the East Conclude on Saturday, Sept 18 and Sept. 25, starting at eight p.m. every evening. The audience is invited to comply with the dancers as they transfer from the East Ave. and Scio St. place to the park in entrance of Ong Siraphisut’s BREATHE set up at 137 East Ave. And the demonstrate is a totally free, non-ticketed event that is encouraged for all ages.

Rebecca Rafferty is CITY’s life editor, and can be achieved at [email protected].