Dance event combines movement, words, music, love
Much like an artist tells stories through painting or sculpture, and a composer tells stories with music, so do dancers, through movement, take an audience – or a single viewer – to someplace they perhaps did not expect.
In St. Petersburg, projectALCHEMY interprets the human condition in many, many ways. The modern dance company founded by dancer/choreographer Alexander Jones in 2018 is back at its home base, The Studio @620, for evening performances Thursday through Saturday. It’s presented intimately, in the round.
Six projectALCHEMY dancers, including Jones himself, will debut his latest creation With Love, . That comma is essential to the title for a couple of reasons.
Jones made and performed With Love in 2017, in response to the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. What an ugly world it can be, he remembers thinking. “It was originally a love letter written to my nephew, about navigating the world, and figuring out how you navigate love and hate.”
The company in rehearsal with Bob Devin Jones.
He decided to revise and revisit it for 2025 (the whole “it can be an ugly world” thing, he figured, still applied). For this second iteration, Jones wanted to include his friend and mentor, Studio @620 founder Bob Devin Jones (no relation). “And at the time,” he said, “I had no clue what Bob was going to be. I knew that I wanted him to dance – which he is doing – and I knew that I wanted some type of theater element.”
But in rehearsal, Jones just didn’t like how the old work was playing out against this new backdrop. So he scrapped the 2017 version and made something new.
Jones, who recently turned 36, was at that time questioning the relative values of friendship, love and loyalty in his life. His thought process had changed, which logically informed how he created movement.
At the same time, he was immersed in bell hooks’ book All About Love: New Visions, in which the writer discusses myriad aspects of love in modern society.
In the new dance work – the one with the comma in the title – Bob Devin Jones not only dances (!), he reads sections of hooks’ work, and passages from a series of letters he and Alexander Jones wrote to one another. “It’s personal to me, it’s personal to him, but it can now be personal to everyone,” Alexander Jones said.
Not that he doesn’t still think, daily, about the horrors of Pulse. “I’ve healed enough to where I personally don’t have to tell that story again,” he explained. “There’s something else that’s on my mind, that I want to talk about.
“In this work, we’re defining what love is. We talk about love being a noun. We talk about love being a verb. We talk about what young love is like, whether it’s platonic or relationship-oriented, into what maturing love looks like.”
The dancers also speak. Sometimes they sing. Some dances are done to recorded music (love songs, of course). And some are performed in silence.
“We talk about how love appears in lies, and in hate,” Jones said. “And I feel like the absence of love is something else. But if you hate someone, that means you have to have had some kind of connection to them, prior to.”
The company members are Kirsten Standridge, Heidi Brewer, Evan Smith, Talia Demps and Sam Kedziora.
Jones will improv a dance, “and at the end of it I’m bringing back a solo that was strictly done for my grandmother, for her 100th birthday party.”
His grandmother passed away on Christmas Eve, 2020.
“It is about legacy, and I feel that I can do the piece now in a way that celebrates her life. And I kind of need that right now.”
The creators and the company will conduct audience talkbacks following each performance. Find tickets and information at this link.
