The lunacy of life and art suspended in mid-air

The genuine reality of Catch Me Bird

BY ANN HASKINS

Catch Me Bird first took flight with an aerial duet, Are You Sleeping. Dangling together and separately, the couple concluded their artistically acrobatic piece with Nehara Kalev suspended only by C. Derrick Jones’ hand ...and their mutual trust. It was 2001 and both were still members of Diavalo Dance Theater, but word went out.

Are You Sleeping? became a central segment in the couple’s 2004 ground-breaking wedding/reality performance to which Jones and Kalev invited the paying public as well as friends and family. Even skeptical members of the media, anticipating a tinsel town publicity stunt, were won over by the unfailing sincerity of the couple who turned their wedding into performance. In a world where television has cheapened the word “reality”, their wedding established the Catch Me Bird couple as deserving serious attention for genuine reality performance, contemporary dance, improvisation and their stunning aerial duets.

Taking a break from rehearsals at UCLA for their Ford Amphitheatre performance on August 13, Jones and Kalev are quick to point out that, while they are most often identified with aerial choreography, the other sides of Catch Me Bird will be displayed in their upcoming Ford performance.

“With Are You Sleeping? we set out to capture the moment when you feel you are falling in love and you know that this is it — wonderful, amazing, and at the same time scary, to risk opening yourself to someone else and be both exposed and embraced,” Jones explains.

With barely a pause, Kalev continues the thought, “Our driving force was not that we wanted to do aerial dance or do experimental theater, but those became means to take these metaphors Derrick and I were experiencing in our immediate lives and to put that into music and imagery. It’s just sometimes that imagery is off the ground.”

The Ford show is seasoned liberally with aerial, including using the towers that flank the outdoor amphitheatre’s stage and a pre-show teaser involving the entryway façade. The show is titled Iron, the traditional element for a sixth wedding anniversary which they are celebrating.

Catch Me Bird's C. Derrick Jones and Nehara Kalev

“We started with the idea of a bed of nails or an iron fist, but then we started playing with the metaphor’s intriguing possibilities,” Kalev quips. Jones adds a more serious note, “As a heavy element, the metaphor of iron gave us permission to go to some of the heavier places in our relationship and come out the other side,” Jones explains. “Iron, when heated, can become liquid or be pounded and shaped into stronger product.”

The image of railroads in their respective heritages also came into play with railroads transporting Jews and others during the WW II holocaust and both the Underground Railroad as an escape route for slaves and later construction of the transcontinental railroad.

The metaphor of iron wills definitely applies to their challenging creative process as life partners who are also collaborative partners and whose choreography is fueled by their life journey. They met in 1998 when they were two of seven selected for UCLA’s coveted master of fine arts choreography program. Jones came to dance through theatre and was already a member of the company of L.A. improvisational performance doyen Rachel Rosenthal. Kalev recalls him as “this performance art person who could take a grain of something and extrapolate it into all sorts of surprising movement.” Kalev had started as a gymnast, but left for dance in New York and then the Bay Area. Jones’s first impression of Kalev was a “San Francisco dancer’s dancer with all this technique.”

Initially, there was no special spark, but when Derrick returned from a hiatus after a knee injury, they immediately recognized a new energy between them, fell in love and discovered how the differences in their artistic temperament and backgrounds could combine into a new, authentic and distinctive choreographic voice. These factors would be both an ongoing source of friction but also hone their work to a sharp finish.

Describing each other’s approach to choreography, their differences are clearly outweighed by their deep mutual respect. Their sources of conflict are the anvil on which they shape their choreography — her deep dance background, his theater and improvisational training, as well as his ability to make myriad connections in their movement and her ability to edit.

The Ford performance marks the first time Jones and Kalev have involved other dancers in their choreography, two other couples who dance together. One couple is recently engaged and the other, married with a two-year-old child. Jones sees the new work as capturing where he and Kalev were, where they are now and a glimpse at the future.

Ann Haskins writes about dance for L.A. Weekly, Pointe Magazine, Dance Spirit Magazine and other performing arts publications. She has provided theater and dance interviews and commentary for KUSC-FM, KLON-FM and KCRW-FM.

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Catch Me Bird's performance is one event in the Ford's 17-event DANCE series.

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