After Seventeen Years, Koresh Dance Company Maintains a Personal Style
Onstage, the dancers in Philadelphia’s Koresh Dance Company seem to have it all. Fierce and powerful movers with torsos as flexible as any ballerina’s, the dancers are also highly trained and able to fluidly release into the floor or cut a cool, sharp line, depending on each piece’s choreography.
But above all, the most prominent characteristic of Koresh dancers is their emotional expressiveness, an ability to fully inhabit roles and infuse them with a sense of feeling and personality. Some may deem the style ‘intense,’ but the last thing the audience can expect to see onstage at a Koresh Dance Company performance is empty, passionless bodies.
And that’s exactly how Ronen Koresh, the company’s founder and still its driving force, wants it. After more than three decades of exploring his interests as a dancer, and in the 17 years since the company was first established, Koresh has developed an idiosyncratic vision of dance as a vehicle for expressing personal experience and incorporating whatever movement vocabulary best serves that purpose.
That doesn’t mean he tolerates sloppy footwork in an effort to cover every movement style. Koresh also runs a dance studio, and his dancers are expected to take classes there and keep themselves in tip-top technical condition. He is unapologetic about doing things his way—even if his efforts don’t fit into others’ neat boxes. Some call the company’s style jazz, others say it’s contemporary. “I call it dance,” says Koresh.
As the heart and soul of Koresh Dance Company and its affiliated school, Ronen Koresh’s history and experience infiltrate the ethos of the company. Born in Israel to parents of Yemenite descent, Koresh first fell in love with folk dancing at age 11. Later exposed to ballet, jazz and modern while part of Batsheva, Israel’s preeminent dance company, Koresh eventually came to the U.S. to study with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre.
But after working his way up to dancing with company members, Koresh realized he didn’t actually want to be part of the Ailey company. “Big companies can be like corporations, and I wanted something less corporate,” he said. Instead, “I wanted the freedom to be creative, to be myself.”
Eventually, Koresh wound up as part of Waves jazz company in Philadelphia, then one of the biggest jazz companies in the country. “It was the best experience I’ve had,” he said. “I didn’t care about anything else—I just wanted to work, and it was an incredible environment for creativity. Many great artists came out of there.”
In particular, he pointed to the company’s artistic director, Shimon Braun, as having had an enormous influence on his style, particularly as a teacher. “I’ve never seen someone who’s had so much charisma. He’s the best teacher I’ve had in my life,” said Koresh, adding that he tries to give his own studio the loving family environment that he felt at Waves.
It was while dancing with Waves that Koresh got the bug to start his own company. He wanted to do things his own way and try out new ideas.
Fang Ju Chou Gant
Photo by Gabriel Bienczycki
Koresh Dance Company was established in 1991, though it wasn’t formally incorporated until 1993, the same year the school was founded. It took seven years before Koresh was able to finally pay his dancers a real wage, but the company is now fully established and known internationally. Composed of nine full members and two apprentices, the group recently returned from three weeks of performing in Korea.
The company’s style has changed over time. “When we started, the work had a jazzy feel, but now it’s more contemporary,” said Koresh, though he admitted to still having a soft spot for jazz. “Jazz allows you to be very free; it’s a natural way of moving, one that Americans do much better than Europeans. It has sex appeal and genuine emotions—it’s real.”
But when he’s choreographing, Koresh uses whatever dance forms he feels are appropriate to the work, including hip-hop or ballet. That contributes to the company’s eclectic style. “I use anything,” said Koresh. “It’s like someone saying black pepper is used only in Indian food. Well, if I like it, I’ll use it.”
Stressing the need for dancers of all types to be proficient in a number of styles, he compared versatility in dance to the ability to speak a number of languages. “Being able to do more means you’re in more demand,” he said. Nonetheless, even though his dancers might spend rehearsal focused on a hip-hop-based piece, the company begins each day with a ballet class. “You can’t go wrong with a technique that’s been perfected for hundreds of years,” he said.
In his classes at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, where he’s been teaching for 22 years, Koresh also stresses technique among his students. But it’s not just about having pointed feet or even bodies that can do anything and make it look easy. He also tries to imbue his students with an acute awareness of their bodies and the impact that each movement, even a simple gesture, can have. As a choreographer, he says that the most important thing to him is that a dancer has a sense of self and can move expressively—though, of course, great technique is always a bonus.
Koresh spoke with admiration for his students at the University of the Arts, many of whom are already strong dancers, although he pointed out that he sees a wide variety of body types. “They don’t all necessarily have lean, tall bodies, but oh my God, can they dance. They’re beasts,” he said. And those students who come to him with talent but little training are often the most rewarding ones. “I love teaching, and that’s what being a teacher is all about.” When someone is still new to the learning process, he said, “you have to tap into their dreams, and then it’s kind of a journey for them, one that you go through with them.”
Many of the company’s dancers came from the University of the Arts; naturally, already knowing Koresh’s style, they had a leg up on the competition at the company’s auditions. Students who take class at the school affiliated with the company also have a chance to learn the company’s style—as well as afro-modern, tap and Pilates. Expanding annually, the school serves more than 200 students.
And if some of the students come in because they watched “So You Think You Can Dance?” and want to try out the moves themselves, that’s fine with Koresh. “It’s fantastic that dance has arrived on TV screens—it makes kids want to dance, and they go to the studio and are exposed to different kinds of dance, and a few wind up wanting to stay.” But he cautions that the competition in those reality dance shows—and the accompanying commercialism—doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand with making good art.
And making good, genuine art that resonates with an audience and moves observers to feel something is Koresh’s real interest in life. Always thinking of new ideas and discussing them with a group of artists he associates with, he maintains an individualistic style of choreography that is determinedly personal. Koresh says that he has no interest in making dances about politics or trying to change the world. For him, dance is about exploring his own complexities in front of an audience and hoping that those watching will see something of themselves in the movement before them.
He echoes that message in his classes. When the students are working on choreography assignments, he says, “they’ll do something on AIDS or race or war, and I’m thinking, just do something that you know, something personal. Those who do that are very successful with their work. Otherwise, they can wind up creating something that’s almost a mockery of the topic.”
But he acknowledges that creating personal works of art, ones that are genuinely honest, is hard. “The reason we’re not as good as we could be is because we’re scared of rejection when we say what we really feel,” said Koresh, adding that as he gets older it becomes easier to follow his own interests rather than catering to others’ tastes.
Everything changes with time, and the past 15 years have been good to Koresh Dance Company. The company has almost 15 performances already booked around the country for the 2008-09 touring year and will be traveling to Mexico in November. Soon, Koresh hopes, the company will be able to afford plane tickets for the whole group to perform in Israel.
He’s excited about the company’s long-term future. “My belief is, if you do things slowly, gradually, the right way—if you build your foundations correctly—you will survive. And in this business, it’s about survival. I don’t want to be a one-hit wonder. I want people to say we’re producing something wonderful. And I’d like to pay my dancers the salaries they deserve, and make them want to stay until retirement.”