Brian Jose hopes the performances at the Phillips Center will engage the right side of your brain, this season.
“[The left] hemisphere of our brain goes to the past and looks to the future,” the University of Florida Performing Arts director says. “The right side of the brain is in that present moment. And that’s what we can offer is that exercise.”
While Jose has only held this role for about nine months, the University of Florida Performing Arts Center’s 25th anniversary has begun. The season is a homage to the 25 years of the UF Performing Arts Program’s history and a nod to the future, where Jose hopes to take the program.
Jose says he wants to expose audience members to “new and wonderful” art forms they may not have seen before, or heard before, while also building their trust in the performing arts program. “I love when people leave the performance with more gravity than when they came in; they have more mass.”
Jose said he was not introduced to the arts until he was 25 years old.
What made him love it so much he decided to pursue a career in the field?
“I could probably list off 10 [performances] that have been really formative for me,” Jose says. “And I think that’s it: the more time you spend seeing performances, each time, you continue to grow and to bend and to find new expressions you didn’t know you liked.”
“At the Phillips Center, people come from all directions and all backgrounds, where they congregate in one spot to share a universal experience,” Jose said. Because of this, he says UFPA plays the role of the major cultural intersection in Gainesville.
It helps that the college town has a liberating framework of large city with the intimacy of a much smaller town, he says.
“I’ll tell anyone who will listen to me that Gainesville pun
ches way above its weight,” Jose says. “We have the cultural offerings of much bigger cities.”
If you ask Kim Tuttle, she will tell you this framework started over 50 years ago.
“The Hippodrome, the Gainesville Chamber Orchestra, and the ballet company Dance Alive all started at the same time, in the ‘60s,” the Dance Alive artistic director says. “And I think it’s part of the reason why we’re all still in existence, is that we all kind of helped each other along, and we created this artistic environment.”
The professional dance company will be performing Fangs at the Phillips Center on Oct. 28. The program will consist of two acts: The first act, Dracula, will be more serious and dramatic. The second act, Vampyra, is will exhibit a funnier, entertaining plot, Tuttle says.
The quaint, brown exterior does not even begin to compare with the colorful dancers and directors bustling inside the Pofhal Dance Studio.
The dancers converse back and forth in variations of Spanish, Russian and English. It is the first day of their new season. In merely a few minutes, the cultural intersection Jose mentioned is only more apparent in this dance studio downtown. One dancer has recently arrived from Cuba, where she was principal dancer and choreographerin- residence, Judy Skinner says. The ballerina’s dark hair is pulled into a tight bun and bright red lipstick paints her wide smile as she chats with the other dancers in the lobby.
A few more dancers will arrive tomorrow, Skinner says: two from Brazil and another from South Florida.
In the frenzy of conversations, Tuttle and Skinner sit calmly with warm smiles. To say they are seasoned professionals would be an understatement. Skinner has been working at Dance Alive since 1979, while Tuttle has been choreographing pieces for the company since 1986.
“[Dance Alive] is made up of international artists who are very high caliber, too. And we’ve been on the state touring program for 40 years,” Tuttle says. “It’s kind of a testament to the city.”
Dance Alive Principal Dancer Andre Valladon has worked as a principal dancer since he was 19 years old. He has danced across the world, from London and France to Brazil. For the past eight years at Dance Alive, Gainesville has been his home base.
“Gainesville is a very artistic city; it’s funny because it’s a small city,” Valladon says. “But the artistic hub here is very intense.”
In just a few months, he will take the stage at the Phillip’s Center with the other international artists, where he hopes to connect with the audience. “When you get on the stage, there’s an energy between the audience and the performers that’s just very palpable,” Tuttle says after rehearsing the part of Dracula with another dancer.
About a half-hour passes, then Valladon and the new dancers split into two studios to begin learning the choreography for Fangs.
In one studio, Tuttle spots the choreography for the dancer playing Dracula. Though it is the first time he has seen steps or heard the music, he follows her movements and gestures effortlessly.
In the other studio across the room Valladon and four other dancers practice lifts that will grace the stage in the Vampyra section of the number.
“The whole point of art is to inspire, and to you know, take the audience somewhere else, take the audience to another level of existence and have them leave the theatre with a new lease on life, maybe just [feeling] lighter. And you know, impart some wisdom, maybe if we’re lucky enough,” Valladon says.
Connection between art and performer have not only proven to be important for Dance Alive members, but for all performances put on by the UF Performing Arts Program. Jose still remembers a patron’s comment after he watched a one-man Moby Dick performance in July. “He came out after seeing it and all he could muster was ‘I have saltwater in my mouth’.”
JENNIFER JENKINS discovered her love for writing when she drafted her first expository essay on a beautician who botched her haircut, in second grade. While she works on her journalism degree at the University of Florida, she interns in the Advantage Publishing editorial department. She appreciates the opportunity to highlight local businesses and talent in Gainesville while she works on honing her rhetoric. Ultimately, she dreams of working in the fashion industry, where a good haircut will be nonnegotiable.