Kristin Alexander got the idea to create Out of the Rose back when she used a friend’s poetry to inspire a piece of her choreography. She then spent time with inFluxdance, a theater company that integrated sign language into the show. Using two collaborators, a poet, and an American Sign Language interpreter, she decided to do the same with W. B. Yeats’ poem “Out of the Rose.” “In the piece, we are challenging the audience to figure out which muses are real and which are fantasy,” Alexander says. “The poetry drives the ‘relationships’ between the Yeats character and his muses.”
The modern dance piece premiered in Charleston in 2013 and has since changed formats somewhat to include spoken translations. “Revisiting the piece allowed me to look at the dance movement vocabulary and, without losing the importance of its original creation, make adjustments that reflected the new dancers in my company and my personal growth as a choreographer,” Alexander says. “The piece evolved by removing the American Sign Language interpretation and changing the role of the male performer from delivering the poetry through ASL to one of spoken word. This changed the dynamic of his integration into the piece and his relationship with the five female dancers.”
The new version of Out of the Rose will be performed for one night only at City Gallery, a non-traditional venue Alexander hopes will help embrace Yeats’ idea of total theater that he explored in his own career
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