New space, music, dance

It’s hard to dance on a layer of sawdust. For the Barefoot Dance Collective, though, that’s just one of the challenges of a nomadic arts group, especially when it comes to using a downtown space that’s been sitting vacant for years – like the venue for the group’s fourth annual Footfalls show this weekend.

But the upside of being in a different place each performance is a new audience and a chance to collaborate with different artists.

This weekend, the BDC will be at 311 S. Seventh St., just down the hill from Puget Sound Pizza. It’s a space made available to them through the city of Tacoma’s Spaceworks program, which is in its second year of arranging for vacant retail space to be loaned temporarily to artists. The space needed a lot of work, says co-founder Stephanie Kriege Pederson.

“It used to be occupied by a cabinet-maker, I think, but it was vacant for years. So there were massive amounts to clean up – the dust and sawdust really builds up when it’s been vacant so long,” Pederson says.

There also was no power for the first month.

“(BDC member) Katie Stricker brought in some gas lamps, and they were rehearsing by lantern-light for a while,” Pederson says. “It was cold, though luckily dancing warms you right up.”

Like other performing groups that have taken on Spaceworks properties (Toy Boat Theatre, Shakespeare in the Parking Lot and the BDC themselves, last May), the dance collective also had to remodel one big space into a stage, wings, backstage area and lobby, installing a dance floor as well.

“We love the beauty of the architecture, the hardwood beams going across the top,” Pederson says. “It’s gorgeous.”

The other bonus to having a shop-front theater is the window space, which the BDC is filling with art installations by choreographers April Nyquist and Michael Hoover. As for the dance, it’s the BDC mixture of contemporary dance, movement theater and improvisation, featuring six new works by BDC co-directors Hoover, Nyquist, Stricker and Pederson. Nyquist’s work is described by Pederson as a “living landscape” set to original live music by Michael Korchonnoff and Joe Reedy.

Pederson, meanwhile, is doing a more dance-based piece for four dancers inspired by her Arizona childhood: “It less tells a formal story than images of sunrise, of cactuses, of lizards scuttling along the rock,” Pederson explains.

There will be music before the show by guitarist Gary Lappier and a final improvisation including every dancer in the show – a BDC tradition that Pederson says is “our personal celebration of the dance community. We try to be an open group for people to work with other people that they wouldn’t normally have a chance to.”

After moving out of its Center Street studio and spending last year as artists-in-residence with Tacoma City Ballet, the Barefoot Dance Collective is now a nomadic company, moving from place to place on a production-by-production basis. This, Pederson says, has its pros and cons.

“It’s been harder to hold classes and workshops, although Michael’s been teaching some free workshops in our new space, and there’s one more to go,” she says. “But it gives us the ability to get the attention of different artists and audiences. It really draws in new people.”

Plus, there’s the incentive of transforming your own performance space.

“Spaceworks Tacoma has provided a great opportunity to inspire artists to create new works and give them a temporary home in which to do so,” says Pederson. “It is amazing how much being in a completely different space motivates the work done.”

Rosemary Ponnekanti: 253-597-8568, rosemary.ponnekanti@thenewstribune.com

BAREFOOT COLLECTIVE’S FOOTFALLS

What: Footfalls contemporary dance performance by The Barefoot Collective

When: 3 and 7 p.m. Saturday and Sunday

Where: 311 S. Seventh St., Tacoma

Tickets: $12-$15

Also: Check out a free all-levels creative movement workshop from 6:30-7:30 p.m. Nov. 23

Information: 206-745-0492, barefootcollective.org, brownpapertickets.com