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Choreographer Ellen Sinopoli teams up with storyteller Pleasant DeSpain and percussionist Brian Melick to create a program of dance, music and spoken word taking audiences on an adventure through stories. The one-hour program explores six different tales – three told simply with words, two others with music & dance, one more with spoken word & music and a final one using all three disciplines in one captivating collaboration!
Telling Tales
The Program
Stories told with words
The Turnip (Russian) A classic and energetic Russian folk tale. Pleasant's variant has been honed by years of sharing with young children throughout the United States.
The Dancing Turtle (Brazil) Originally told by the Indigenous People of Brazil, Pleasant heard several variants throughout Latin America. This is his favorite as Turtle uses her wit to survive.
Stories told with words and music
Coyote Steals Spring ( Northwest Canada)
A Northwest Native American folk tale with Coyote as trickster and hero. Pleasant heard this variant in Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in the early 1970's.
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Stories told with music and dance Make Way for the Segue |
Stories told with dance, music and spoken word
Dance Granny Dance (Dutch Antilles in the Caribbean)
A traditional Anansi the Spider story. Anansi originated in Africa and is a famous trickster figure. Pleasant heard this variant on the island of St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, in 1967.
Collaborating Artists
Pleasant DeSpain (yes, it’s his real name) has true and traditional stories to tell. World traveler and former television host, Pleasant is the author of 17 award-winning, multicultural story collections. A pioneer of the American storytelling renaissance, his goal is universality; to show that people everywhere are far more alike than they are different. Pleasant appears regularly at schools, theatres and festivals throughout the United States. Visit his website at www.storypro.com. Brian Melick is active as a performer, recording artist and educator. He has been performing since the age of thirteen and is featured on over 100 commercial recordings including his debut, PERCUSSIVE VOICES, which made #23 on the world music charts as well as being released as a Sound Library. He has two educational bodies of work: The “How To” of Udu and Making Percussion Instruments Out of Found Objects. Visit his website at www.uduboy.com. |
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Audience Response
"The performance was wonderful! In third grade we study fables and folktales. It was great for the students to experience storytelling accompanied by music and dance." ~ Third grade teacher
"What good energy! Good job with putting it all together. It was a fun treat!" ~ Upper Hudson Library System
"The show was fabulous! I brought a fifth grade boy with me and he also thought the show was great ... and his mom was surprised and happy to hear him say he would like to see the dance company again! I am very intrigued by the combination of dance and storytelling and do indeed look forward to more!" ~ Troy Public Library
Metroland Review
TELL ME A STORY
Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company
The Egg, Nov. 6
An engaging storyteller and a percussionist for all seasons joined the Ellen Sinopoli dancers in a Sunday afternoon program that, as Goldilocks would say, was “just right.”
In a smoothly-paced hour, the audience of about 150 kids and their families were treated to folktales from Brazil, Russia, the Antilles Islands, and a Northwest Native American story about how Coyote steals spring. Storyteller Pleasant DeSpain, a recent arrival from Arizona, was sometimes accompanied by an ebullient Brian Melick, sometimes by Sinopoli’s five limber dancers, and sometimes only by the audience, who DeSpain gently encouraged to help him out with a collective chant or gesture.
Well-wrought tales and shimmering musical lines lifted Sinopoli’s scaled down choreography to a pleasant plateau. All the elements, including clean-lined costumes by Kim Vanyo, cohered nicely.
Animal Rhythms , danced in black knee-length pants and leaf-printed tunics, presented giraffes with long upraised arms, lumbering gibbons with humped shoulders, and gazelles who flew about the small stage and jumped off and raced out of the theater. Make Way for the Segue, a premiere, showed the dancers moving as one in a vine-like line, bending from the waist in profile to make a sturdy garden wall, or waving their arms, one after the other, like branches in the wind. This was tight, orderly choreography, shapely and easy to read. Working in a small space led to well-designed dances.
The best was another premiere, Dance Granny Dance, which brought together all the elements: storyteller, percussionist and dancers in a West Indian tale about the trickster Anansi the Spider. Sinopoli used the whole theater, from the top row to the back stage curtain to dance this story. It was fun to see three grandmothers (Melissa George, Yukiko Sumiya and Laura Teeter) all miming together in their calico print dresses and lacy sweaters, as they danced to market and home to sell their vegetables.
We first saw Anansi as a pair of sharp-fingered hands emerging from the back curtain. These were followed by the arms and legs of Ann Olson and Sarah Pingel, the two tallest dancers in the company, dressed in unitards of pied purple and black. A neat idea to present two dancers ”eight arms and legs in all” as the spider. Granny was an exuberant finale to a well-planned program. We talk about building audiences of the future. Shows like the Egg’s family series are the building blocks.
