DeeAnna Hiett
In an overheated basement dance studio on the UMKC campus, DeeAnna Hiett is in a deep creative ferment. “Here, try it with me,” she says to one male dancer, as she leaps onto his right shoulder, twists her arched body around the back of his neck, falls into his left arm and then drops to the ground as noiselessly as a cat. The women stare intently. “You’re a ‘scarf,’” Hiett tells them. “Let the men do all the work.” The students try it and become tangled in knots — legs and arms twisted. Laughter. They will spend hours on this single eight-count move, part of a new piece for the Country Club Plaza lighting in November.
It’s the type of move you might see at an Alvin Ailey performance, but with a special dash of Hiett seasoning. Aside, Hiett reveals that she’s not certain how much the undergraduate dancers will be able to handle. But that’s her style: Push the limits up-front and back off only as needed. “I want to see how courageous they are first,” she says. “You don’t just want to start from the standpoint of safety all the time. I don’t want these to be just ordinary movements.” It’s partly that fearlessness and complexity that have made Hiett the ideal choice for this year’s Charlotte Street Foundation Generative Performing Artist Award, the first given to a choreographer.
Her choreography has strong women, African dance, physical partnering with plenty of sexual tension. Her years as a dancer and/or student with major companies have provided her with technique, attitude and raw material. You’ll see ferocious Ailey licks in her work, prim Martha Graham slithers, and pure ballet. In Neo Tango from 2003 there’s Bob Fosse razzmatazz amidst the torchy balletic tango. In The Passage (2005) a regal female taunts her fawning man-servants, trapped in some moody, remote Middle Eastern clime. The big gestural statements of Bound To… (2007) include limb-flailing tribal abandon, stylized coitus, codependence, even violence: It’s as if you’re watching the primordial birth of the Battle of the Sexes itself.
You’ll also see nods to the choreographers whose works make up the repertoire of the Wylliams/Henry Contemporary Dance Company, with which Hiett has danced and choreographed since 1994: Talley Beatty, Donald McKayle, Lester Horton, Dwight Rhoden, Kevid Iega Jeff, Milton Myers. But the 41-year-old Texas native rails against being categorized. She just wants to connect with the audience. “Down deep inside me is a humanitarian. If I can speak to someone with dance, then I’ve done my job.” She’s created some 20 choreographic projects — for Cleveland Contemporary Dance Theatre, Wylliams/Henry, the Coterie Theatre, the Lyric Opera of Kansas City and the Kansas City Ballet’s “In the Wings” program.
Hiett started dancing at 11 with Pamela Erwin’s Dance Factory in nearby Tyler and later studied at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center. A generation later, she’s busy planning the second half of her career. This fall she became a full-time Assistant Professor of Modern Dance at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance — an opportunity that will allow her more leeway to create new works. “I look forward to trying to make myself a better choreographer. I know it’s in there: I just need to draw it out of myself more.”
-Paul Horsley
