Modern Dancers Will Take Museumgoers Higher - High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia - Brief Article

Dance Magazine, Feb, 2000 by Heather Wisner, Karen Dacko, Kate O'Neill

For the next five months, Atlanta's High Museum and modern dance company Room to Move Dance will collaborate on a new interdisciplinary series called "Rhythmic High." Company members will perform a new dance each month in the galleries, inspired by individual works and themed rooms from the museum's permanent collection. Joy Patty, the High Museum's head of adult programs, said the series offers a new way for museumgoers to explore the collection, based on the idea that people learn in different ways. "It's a way to make connections between two different art forms--visual and performing," she said.

How much space dancers would have to move around the work helped dictate which works choreographer Amy Gately composer Frederic Moston chose to interpret. The company has themed its five programs according to the collection's themed groupings. "We're trying to incorporate the process of art into the of choreography," Gately

February's inaugural program, "Bound and Unbound," which debuts during Black History Month, responds to Jackie Winsor's circle of rope and Martin Puryear's wood and mesh hoop in the museum's Abstraction section with a trio that tests ideas of tension and containment.

Gately, who said that local audiences tend to shy away from modern dance, hopes to demystify the process with an introductory discussion of her process before each performance. Shows will be held twice daily on weekends, and the series will culminate in an evening-length show in June in which Gately will put the pieces together for the company to perform in the museum's Robinson Atrium. RTMD will also teach workshops and In lead tours for local school groups. "We'll be using the same themes," said Gately. "They'll just be broken down differently."