Invitation to the Dance

Photos: John Kish IV

Above, Rebecca Moore, Bridget, Jessica Cusumano, Cathleen, and Kathryn Washer form a floating creature.

Up, up, and away! At left, Jody Oberfelder (lower right) shows Andrea Nudelman (top) and Cathleen Lavelle how to anchor their airy sculpture to dancers on the ground (Alycia Piazza, face, and Bridget O’Rourke, back to camera).

Don’t let that horse eat that violin! cried Chagall’s mother,” is the first line of a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

The topsy-turvy, jewel-colored, childlike world of Marc Chagall (1887-1985) is the inspiration for Landmarks of Dreams, a full-length work by the Jody Oberfelder Dance Projects of New York.

When it brings the piece to the College on April 21, the company of nine dancers will be augmented by five Moravian students: Jessica Cusumano ’07, Devon; Cathleen Lavelle ’05, Bushkill; Andrea Nudelman ’05, Haworth, N.J.; Bridget O’Rourke ’07, Lansdowne; and Kathryn Washer ’06, Long Pond; as well as jazz dance instructor Alycia Piazza.

Oberfelder and one of her dancers came in February to teach the students their moves, which include lifts and carries and line dances. The combinations have that levitational quality that fills Chagall’s paintings of Russian-Jewish folk life, where musicians and peasant farmers, cows and flowers float about under the amused eyes of heavenly bodies. Remember the album cover for the musical Fiddler on the Roof? It was an homage to Chagall’s buoyant world.

Airborne: The Juggler (1949) by Marc Chagall shows the painter’s happy disregard for gravity and his reliance on Russian Jewish folk figures.