The recently formed multicultural dance troupe founded by dancer/choreographer and NWSA professor Peter London gets its first big local stage outing for “Spring Nights at the Arsht,” which is comprised of six new dances.

Never assume that because an artist performs in his or her city’s premier arts venue that they’ve reached their pinnacle.

Sometimes, performing there is just the beginning of bigger and better things, like reaching new audiences, or being discovered and catapulted to other markets. And that’s what the Miami Made Festival, now in its fifth season, and its home the Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, can help artists do.

“You think about New York, Chicago, L.A., as places where new work is created, but really, I believe that Miami-based artists are creating some of the most exciting art anywhere in the country,” says the Arsht Center’s executive vice president, Scott Shiller, who’s been involved with Miami Made Festival since its inception.

From Feb. 26 to March 3, the Miami Made Festival 2013 — now with new philanthropic sponsors including the Riviera South Beach hotel on board — features a week-long plethora of events that include, free of charge, staged play readings, pop-up performances, and a dance showcase.

The twist here is that these are works in progress, which first come to life at the Arsht Center in previous incarnations, and are now ready for the broader world to see their evolution.

Last year the dance highlight was the almost evolved work from the much-acclaimed Rosie Herrera Dance Theater, Dining Alone, which will make its fully formed premiere in New York at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in April.

This year the focus is on Cuban-American Letty Bassart, a choreographer, dancer, and writer who in a previous life was a hospice nurse and, you guessed it, an epidemiologist.

“It’s so powerful to be able to show your work in a place where there’s a certain level of production and support in terms of resources, and it’s really interesting too that this particular support comes for a work that has been seen in a very raw kind of state, and that they’re willing to invest in its growth,” says the Miami native. “That is something that is so rare.”

Bassart’s dance piece Good, God, Go, whose first iteration goes back to 2010’s Miami Made edition, will be showcased on March 2 at 3:00 p.m. and at 7:30 p.m., at the Carnival Studio Theater in the Arsht’s Ziff Ballet Opera House, 1300 Biscayne Blvd. All that you need to know for now is that this work features a trio of dancers, animation and film, sculpture, a cappella singing, a marching band, and 50-plus wooden canaries (yes, wooden canaries.)

“Miami Made Festival is a step further, not just a launch of these ideas as a work in progress, but it’s also the recognition of the development of these ideas, which is incredibly humbling,” says the 2012 Knight Arts Challenge grant recipient.

For Bassart and her Miami Made Festival colleagues, more good news may be on the way.

“This year’s festival really represents sort of a new commitment to the Miami Made program,” says Shiller. “Out of all of the projects that are being done this year, the Arsht Center will likely produce some, if not all of these, as fully developed works in our future seasons.”

Along with the Good, God, Go, other highlights include:

Pop-Up Performance: Extended Stay from the Project [Theatre], in the style of reality TV, Feb. 26 & 27 at 9:00 p.m. at the Riviera South Beach Hotel, 2000 Liberty Ave., Miami Beach.

Staged Play Reading: Fear Up Harsh, based on a military phrase that refers to “enhanced interrogation,” Feb. 28 at 7:30 p.m. at the Carnival Studio Theater, Arsht Center.

 Staged Play Reading: Two-Merz, dark comedy about brothers with cancer, March 3 at 4:00 p.m. at the Carnival Studio Theater, Arsht Center.

All are free on first come first seated basis; www.arshtcenter.org.

Port-au-Prince based Ayikodans returned to Miami this weekend for the second year in a row. And choreographer Jean Guy Saintus, with his unrivaled corps of dancers, proved once again that Haiti is home to immense and sophisticated culture worthy of the world stage.

Ayikodans is an ideal of global artistic exchange. Saintus has mastered the potential of contemporary European and American dance while remaining loyally embedded in the traditional African influence that animates his country. Ayikodans uses almost none of the repetitive patterning found in folkloric dance, which Saintus dismisses as touristic. Instead, their elaborate spatial and movement compositions, defined by elegant lighting design and set pieces, were highly original.

As contemporary and culturally expansive as Ayikodans may be, their performance was intimately bound to the Haitian experience. Anyone who visits Haiti is imprinted by the sounds of the country. Music is everywhere — from compa on loudspeakers to roaming rara bands to the singing and drumming of Vodoun. At the Arsht, Ayikodans foregrounded both recorded and live Haitian music. Their new piece, Danse de L’Araignee, represents a spider spirit from Vodoun called Gede Zarenyen. Here, within fully developed contemporary dance language, Saintus planted the dynamics of traditional Haitian dance and music. Danse de l’Araignee began with a long interval of pitch black, colored by a high wailing voice. The singer was James Germain, a man with a humble but captivating presence. Over the course of the piece, Germain traded sound space with a group of impressive traditional drummers who sometimes shook with their own intensity. Alternately sharp and driving rhythms punctuated the dancers’ bodies as they pulsed through a stream of vivid visual configurations.

Distinctly Haitian emotional, political, and spiritual landscapes were also present in full. In particular, the heartbreak of the 2010 earthquake and its aftermath was keenly felt in Anmwey Ayiti Manman. Miami first saw this piece in 2011, but last year’s version was decorated by refined lighting effects. This year, the piece in its new form was almost unrecognizable. Aesthetic beauty was stripped out and the black box was left essentially bare. Two walls, papered with newspaper pages, stood on either side of the stage and the entire performance space was lined by razor wire. The performers were not so much dancing as expressing pain. They described physical wounds, but also betrayal by national and international political players and a crisis of faith in the earth itself. The audience was presented with anguish, raw, and unadorned. But finally, Anmwey Ayiti Manman revealed the persistence of the will to live. While this piece recalls tragic circumstances, its existence as a work of art is one kind of triumph against disaster.

In a subtler link to Haitian culture, every performer demonstrated a total and almost spiritual dedication to the artistic vision behind the performance. Such devotion points towards a high level of creative commitment but its particular tone bears a relationship to Vodoun. When devotees are possessed during a ceremony, their bodies are totally given to the expression of sacred spirit, and the individual’s own movements, physical limits, even ways of talking are transformed. In the same way, the Ayikodans performers seemed to have given every cell of their bodies over to the dance, and their athleticism was so complete that it was almost superhuman. On stage, performers jumped high in the air and then landed on the floor in complex poses like some kind of animal. They rippled from their heads and shoulders down to their feet while their hands and faces, even their gazes, were intensely focused. There was nothing unconscious about their movement — they were each entirely present in the performance, not as individual egos but as a cohesive group of high-caliber performers in service of an idea.

Given the quality of this performance, it was inconceivable that only a handful of people would see the show in the Arsht Center’s small Carnival Theater, even with a sold-out crowd. Recently, the company was saved from the brink of dissolution and now, with a broader base of support including Miami-based backers, the company may well be able to take their work to larger audiences around the world. This is the kind of exposure they deserve.

Photo: Manny Hernandez

This article first appeared in Miami New Times

Originally published in SunPost on March 17,2011

Having written about Spanish-language theater in Miami for almost 10 years, I have waited a long time to see Spanish and English on stage together in a way that is as complex, dynamic, and fluid as it is in the daily life of this city. At last! It was exciting to watch Carlos Caballero and Elizabeth Doud take the stage at the Miami Made Here and Now Festival presented by the Arsht Center and Miami Light Project. An excerpt of their work-in-progress, Si Vas a Sacar un Cuchillo, USAlo (If You’re going to Pull a Knife, Use it) gave flesh to the word bilingual, and it revealed a glimpse into the theatrical future Miami’s two native languages could have if they were allowed to share the same stage every once in awhile.

The excerpt that debuted at the Arsht Center’s Carnival Studio Theater revealed the characters and the essential loneliness they share. Caballero is Sisyphus incarnate (just replace the gigantic boulder with environmental disaster). He dons a workman’s jumpsuit blackened by dirt, oil, and labor. His face is smeared with soot and each work boot seems to be made of lead as he hauls a net littered with dirty blackened plastic bottles on stage. Elizabeth Doud’s siren has a contemporary twist. Sporting a long blonde wig and white face and body paint, the alabaster mermaid tethered to a bleached-out plastic inner tube and palm tree appears weakened and anemic.

These costumes and minimalist props convey the piece’s planet-in-peril message clearly, but it’s Beckett who sets the mood. Caballero and Doud have pieced the performance’s text together from three plays by Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot, End Game, and Not I. The text is delivered by Caballero in Spanish and Doud in English. If you’re going to carve your text from the cannon, who better to borrow from than Beckett. The syncopated rhythm and relentless lament of his prose is powerfully delivered by Caballero, a seasoned stage performer. While Doud’s energy and emotion is palpable, I felt that vocally, she is still in search of her character’s persona. Also having seen Doud’s enigmatic and often sardonic presence as a dancer, I longed to see more movement and physicality in her mermaid.

The texts in Spanish and English are thankfully not volleyed back and forth in simultaneous translation style and there are no supertitles. Instead, the glaring contrast between the two speakers — male/female, dark/light, clean/dirty — serves to book end a fascinating dialogue between languages.

In the long run, sticking only to Beckett might homogenize the play’s more contemporary quirky nuances (she’s an out of work Disney character actress and he’s an unemployed oil platform worker), but this is work in progress worth following. The fully developed version will premiere in June at the Miami-Dade County Auditorium.