Selah’s Sound, Smoke, and Vibes 

Selah Dance Collective has a slogan that undulates across its website and shows up on the company’s new t-shirt: “No choreography, just vibes.” The phrase came from a post-show comment by a dancer’s spouse about a segment in their latest work, Sound and Smoke, which resonated with Selah founder and artistic director Meredith Cabaniss Ventura.

“There was definitely choreography,” Ventura said. “But one of our big passions is expanding the dance audience because we’re trying to create something that’s more accessible or relatable to people. So if what they receive is the vibes, we love it, because it means that they’re able to connect with it in some way. We want to engage with the audience and for them to come away thinking about things and asking questions.” 

That should certainly be the case when Selah remounts a reworked Sound and Smoke, an interdisciplinary exploration of early modern dance and its intersections with the mythical decadence of Weimar-era cabaret, particularly “dances of death” as they appear throughout history. The hour-long work, which performs January 12 and 13 at Center Stage Theatre, references known literary figures while blending popular culture and high art in the style of the cabaret and modern dance artists referenced throughout Sound and Smoke, Ventura explained. Each of the 26 dancers in the cast represents a woman whose life, work and death speak to contemporary ideas about women’s bodies. 

“It’s a natural progression of the research I’ve been doing as a master’s and PhD candidate at UCSB into early modern dance; experimental work that took place in cabarets in Germany, and the women pioneers who for the first time could tell their story in their own voice,” she said. “I’m looking at what authorship means for dance, whose stories are being told, weaving together 26 different characters from literature and people from real life. I’ve referenced a lot of cultural ideas, and characters that have entered the cultural consciousness. Where do these stories interact? How can they be applied to our ideas of women?” 

But don’t worry if the references fly by without your recognizing them. It’s not important to know the characters, Ventura said. 

“That was the backend for me of building this world and giving a movement language to each of these dancers, for them to have something to pull from as they’re performing,” she said. “This piece has required a lot of formations and diagrams – there’s 21 different sections. But they all flow into each other, so you can’t really tell … My approach is never to make a statement outright but to ask a lot of questions and not necessarily to deliver a specific answer, but rather engage everyone.” 

In other words, just vibes. 

Visit www.selahdancecollective.com for more information and tickets