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In transition
Lorraine Chapman at Green Street Studios
BY IRIS FANGER

Among local dance fans, Lorraine Chapman is a performer best known for Let Bygones Be, the eloquent solo created for her by Marcus Schulkind. (She did it last weekend at his Green Street Studios concerts; Marcia Siegel’s review is on page 23.) But now, she’s embarked on a career as a choreographer, garnering commissions from other troupes and making works for the recently incorporated Lorraine Chapman: The Company, which will be performing at Green Street this weekend.

Chapman "hasn’t wanted to do anything but dance" since the age of six, when she began studying with Frances Kotelly in Arlington. By age 11, she was moonlighting at Boston Ballet several times a week, graduating into Sam Kurkjian’s classes and company at age 14. "Even high school was a problem because all I wanted to do was dance," she says, so she transferred to the Royal Ballet of Winnipeg School because it offered both dance and high-school classes. By 18, she had become a professional ballet dancer in Canada. She transferred to New York to dance with Eliot Feld’s company but says, "I wasn’t happy there."

On her return to Boston, she met Amy Spencer and Richard Colton; she danced in their works and those of Schulkind and Diane Arvanites-Noya. In 1995, she began to participate in the Dance Complex’s series of shared-choreographers’ concerts; later, she teamed up with Perla Joy Furr and Carol Somers in the Choreographers Group. After a year in Seattle, where she was chosen to perform at the city’s premier modern-dance space, she came back to Boston but almost gave up on choreographing: "It was so hard." The prize of a 2002 Choreographic Fellowship at the Yard on Martha’s Vineyard changed her mind: "I thought if I got picked for this, I shouldn’t stop." Since then, she’s received commissions from the Alberta Ballet, the Commonwealth Ballet, and the early-music group Vox Consort plus one of the 2004 Choreography Fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Her concerts this weekend will include portions of the work she made for the young dancers of the Commonwealth Ballet, several segments of her choreography for Bach’s St. John Passion (this will be premiered in its entirety in March), and two new works, I Love Horse Feathers, which is based on the Marx Brothers’ film, and Exquisite Corpses, which she did in collaboration with local theater director David R Gammons. Chapman will dance in Horse Feathers with her friend Mucuy Bolles, who’s currently appearing in The Lion King at the Opera House. (He’s taking personal days to appear with Chapman.) Another guest artist is Elizabeth Waterhouse, from Ballett Frankfurt.

Chapman, who turns 37 next month, says, "I’m trying to become more of a choreographer, less of a dancer. I’m getting more with the role, whatever it is." Although her MCC grant is funding the Green Street weekend, it was, she points out, "so little money. If I had $20,000, I’d be doing a different concert in a larger space. Where you present makes a difference in what the work looks like. I’m really lucky with my dancers, but they have to work every day, and sometimes we can rehearse only once a week. To really develop work takes time. Like me, the local folks with no money, we do the best we can."

Lorraine Chapman: The Company performs this Friday and Saturday, December 17 and 18, at Green Street Studios, 185 Green Street in Central Square. Tickets are $20, or $17.50 for students and Dance Alliance members; call (617) 864-3191 or (781) 258-1631.


Issue Date: December 17 - 23, 2004
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