The Souls of Their Shoes

David Zambrano who has described himself as a “full-time movement researcher,” was an active presence in this city’s Downtown dance scene for about 15 years starting in the early 1980s. But since the mid-’90s, the Venezuelan dancer-choreographer been conducting his research and pursuing his deep interest in cultural exchange primarily in Europe, from his base in Amsterdam. This week, he returns to Danspace Project, where he often showed his new works starting in the mid-’80s, with Soul Project, in which he and six others offer their decidedly idiosyncratic, unpredictable interpretations of songs by Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner, James Brown and others.

First performed in Amsterdam in 2006, Soul Project features an excitingly international cast of performers from Mozambique, Slovenia, Greece and Slovakia. They’re all dancers whom Zambrano encountered in his extensive travels teaching workshops. A strong believer in improvisation and spontaneity, Zambrano shaped the piece through intensive rehearsals, but what happens at any given performance remains quite open and full of surprises. It is essentially a series of solos, but the order in which they are danced is not set nor is their location within the performance space, which is left open. Zambrano encourages the audience to follow the action as it unfolds, to get close to each performer.

“The piece is made so that the public will appreciate it more if they come closer to whoever is performing. They often sit on the floor,” he explains by phone from Amsterdam, likening the experience of the solos to that of listening to a storyteller. As Soul Project has been performed in various cities, he has observed that each audience finds its own approach, and route, into the work. “It’s not like the public always reacts the same way. It depends on who guides them. Sometimes they really open up the whole room; sometimes people immediately go and sit next to a performer and sometimes they walk around.

“I always liked soul music, since I was very young—especially the way soul singers sing,” he says. One aim for the work was to discover body language with the same evocative intensity as this music, that can touch a viewer in the same way those vintage soul singers’ voices touched him. But don’t expect to see dancing that you would find at a club or a party. Led by Zambrano, these performers dig deep and move with uninhibited gusto, and the results can be idiosyncratic and unexpected. It’s a celebration of the music and of the individual responses to it.

Zambrano recalls other ideas that went into Soul Project. “One of the reasons that I made this piece is because in the one I made just before, we were all together all the time onstage. It was a ‘social-centric’ group piece. We were constantly passing through each other, over under and around, to jazz music. Right after that, I had an idea: why not make, for the next one, an ‘egocentric’ dance piece, where the ego, or the personal, takes the center of the situation. And then only that person is the one powerfully and spontaneously performing. And we are all supporting that. The solos are all improvisational but we play with five different movement qualities that we practiced a lot. We rehearsed improvisation, performing for each other, for eight weeks, every day.

“I had all the dancers put their feet very well planted on the floor, sometimes for one hour, sometimes three hours, sometimes the whole day. That was during the rehearsal, and some of us do it during the piece also. My idea was, from my research: if the soles of our feet are very well planted on the floor and we feel very well connected with the earth, then our soul, or spirit, has more playfulness.

Adding to the distinctive look of Soul Project are the fantastical costumes, a freeform medley designed by Mat Voorter that allow for plenty of exposed flesh. Zambrano sports a candy-cane-striped ringmaster’s suit, in keeping with his role as the work’s emcee of sorts; orienting the audience before the action gets underway. How that action unfolds, and what that audience encounters, will be marked by the in-the-moment spontaneity that Zambrano cherishes and nurtures in all his work.

Soul Project

Jan. 21–23, Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, 131 E. 10 St. (at 2nd Ave.), 866- 811-4111 or www danspaceproject.org; 8, $18.