It will probably be a while before Tampa can be considered a national
mecca for modern dance. But in recent years, the area's surprisingly
strong dance scene has started to emerge from the shadows to grab a bit
of the national spotlight.
Much of the credit belongs to
Moving Current, the company widely acknowledged as Tampa's premiere modern dance group.
A trio of prominent local choreographers founded Moving Current 12 years ago, and its reputation has grown steadily since.
In fact, this year, for the first time, dancers from other parts of the
country have relocated to Tampa, just for the opportunity to work with
Moving Current. That has never happened in Tampa before.
Maybe even more significantly, Moving Current's impact has been so
strong locally that people who don't care a whit about modern dance are
at least passingly familiar with the company.
"Now when I go different places and I mention Moving Current, people say,
'Oh, I've heard of that.' " says
Erin Cardinal, one of the company's
founders and co-artistic directors. "That never happened until pretty
recently."
Local dance aficionados have benefited in a couple of ways from Moving Current's burgeoning reputation.
Growing A Fan BaseThe most direct benefit has been in the quality of the three annual
Moving Current concerts at the
University of South Florida. The
concerts feature stronger dancers and a wider choreographic vision as
dancers from other areas join the company's ranks. Moving Current's
concerts are among the highlights of the local dance season. They've
developed a solid and growing fan base, even while attendance for
concerts by big-name national acts at local performing arts centers has
dropped off.
And new dancers who have come to Tampa to join the company – and local
dancers who can now stay in town at the University of South Florida
(USF), the
University of Tampa,
St. Petersburg College or other local
dance programs, rather than heading off to New York to pursue a dance
career -- have produced their own work at such venues as the
Ritz Theater and the
Hillsborough Community College theater in Ybor City.
Another benefit of Moving Current's growing national reputation shows
in its ability to attract guest artists from around the country. In
recent months,
Detroit's Paula Kramer,
Miami's Bill Doolin and
Nathan Dryden, an internationally renowned aerial choreographer based in
Seattle, have presented works here, often using
Moving Current dancers.
Without Moving Current, it's unlikely that these artists would find a forum for their work in Tampa.
Sowing The SeedsThe company's roots go back to the late 1990s, when choreographers
Cynthia Hennessy and
Elsa Vabuena floated the idea in a conversation
with Cardinal.
Like most dancers who learned their art in Tampa, Cardinal figured
she'd have to leave her hometown to develop her career. Indeed, not
long after she graduated from USF, she headed to New York City.
She was doing OK there, performing with
Pedro Alejandro Dance. She was
a featured performer with a respected company in one of the greatest
cities in the world for performing arts. She was reviewed in the New
York Times. Her career seemed to be on the right track.
A visit back home changed the course of her career and the face of performing arts in Tampa.
"I had actually just come back to study massage therapy." Cardinal
says. "I was going to go back to New York and that was going to be my
day job. There just had to be something better than working at T.G.I.
Friday's."
During that visit, Hennessy and Valbuena, two of her friends from the
local dance community, approached her with the idea of forming a new
kind of dance company for Tampa. It would have a triumvirate of
artistic directors. It would be a collective that could create and
present a broad spectrum of modern dance, instead of offering the
vision of a single artistic director.
As magnetic as a promising dance career in New York may have seemed,
the chance to sow the seeds of modern dance here at home proved
irresistible. She didn't have to think long before accepting the offer.
Taking To Tampa's Stages
Now dancers from around the country regularly send videos of their work
to Moving Current, just on the chance they might get to dance here. The
quality has been so strong recently that Cardinal, Hennessy and new Artistic Director Kristin O'Neal accepted more new dancers than they
had planned. (Valbuena left Moving Current to concentrate on her own
Tampa-based company, Gaudere Danza.)
"We're a huge company now," Cardinal says.
In recent years, a highlight of Moving Current's season has been its
New Grounds concert in the spring. New Grounds offers aspiring
chrogeographers – some of them students, others corps dancers who don't
have the chance to develop their own work with the companies they dance
for – an opportunity to showcase their work on a professional stage
with top-quality dancers. New Grounds has become so well-known that it
has moved beyond its regional focus and now brings in applications from
around the United States and even other countries.
Cardinal allows that Tampa is a long way from becoming a national focal
point for modern dance. But thanks to a plethora of excellent
performance spaces and the work of Moving Current, it's a lot closer
than it was 12, eight or even two years ago.
"There are other cities that are more supportive of dance," Cardinal
says. "But Tampa has so much going for it. Between USF, the new theater
at HCC, and the
TECO Energy Foundation Theater at the (Straz) Performing Arts Center,
which is a great size for dance, I think Tampa has a shot."
Marty Clear is a Tampa-based freelance writer who specializes in writing about the performing arts. Comments? Contact 83 Degrees.