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By AMIRA JENSEN
Before 8 a.m. on an August morning, a group of Austin Energy workers kicked up dirt and shot the breeze as the sun began raising temperatures to suffocating triple digits.
“Did you stick your head out the window for that Kennedy look?” a worker joked with Ryan Moore, who drives from the small town of Elgin to work for the city every day.
As they stood in front of their utility trucks at the Travis County Expo Center, some of them chewing tobacco and others swigging Monster energy drinks, another truck rumbled up beside them. Allison Orr, the artistic director and founder of Forklift Danceworks, slid down from her seat carrying a bag of breakfast tacos for her tiny dancers.
Orr shook hands with the men, many of whom still seemed uncertain about why they were meeting. It was the group’s first rehearsal for PowerUP, a dance production starring power line mechanics—Orr’s earnest pursuit to show the community how her subjects illuminate their daily lives.
“I’m going to start wearing a tutu to work,” joked Brad Payton, an Austin Energy employee that has been in the field since 1999.
Skepticism is expected with Orr’s visions; it is what challenges her and partially drives her inspiration to create large-production dance projects with non-professional dancers. She sees beauty in their everyday lives and livelihoods, and gives them a stage to showcase what is often otherwise unseen.
“I really find inspiration in hearing other peoples’ stories and uncovering the love of their job, why they do their job, what gets them to get up every morning at 4:30 and do a job where they’re basically risking their life,” Orr said.
PowerUP features around 50 power workers and their machinery. The choreography is based on Orr’s observations of their work and is set to an original score by composer Graham Reynolds that will be performed by a live orchestra. The stage, an open field studded with utility poles, will be surrounded by bleachers to support an expected crowd of 6,000+ for the free September 21 and 22 performances.
Such an ambitious production isn’t novel to Orr; her 2009 “Trash Project” enlisted the support of the City of Austin’s Sanitation Department, and most importantly, the workers’ faith in her capability to make dancers out of trash workers and their trucks. The process, from Orr’s ride-along research to the sold-out performance, was captured in Austin director Andrew Garrison’s Trash Dance. The documentary and Forklift’s mission to empower “all people to be actively engaged in the creative process” gained recognition at several film festivals and national press coverage.
Orr laughs about how she was “never a star,” though she grew up dancing. The Austin native was first exposed to modern dance at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, where she studied Anthropology. Her background in ethnography is essential to her productions, which have included the gamut from Elvis impersonators to Venetian gondoliers. Part of her fascination with power workers, besides free-climbing soaring poles and putting their life at risk every day, is how most will stay in the field until they retire—a rarity nowadays.
“I just spend a good bulk of the time, 60 to 70 percent, in research mode,” Orr said. “It’s just researching and building relationships.”
PowerUP has been in the works for three years, most of that time spent getting her foot in the door with Austin Energy. Once she got permission, Orr began shadowing and learning all aspects of the trade, from the underground power lines to 300-foot utility poles. She has spent the past year gleaning their natural interactions with their equipment and discovering the art therein.
“They’re not pretending,” Orr said. “And it’s not that dancers pretend—it’s a different kind of relationship to movement. There’s a different kind of presence involved. And when I see a really gifted dancer, I see the same qualities—of not putting something on, of being genuine.”
The production will also highlight some of the dancers’ talents outside of their work; an engineer is also a slam poet, a lineman plays accordion. Orr will work with each group only three to four times before the performances, giving her little room for error when trying to get every piece to function and flow.
“Unlike trained dancers, they’re not going to get psyched about rehearsals for six months,” Orr said. “They lose that urgency. Plus they’ve got to fix power lines, they can’t practice all the time.”
Every project gets easier, she said. As she pulls out a blowup map of the grounds, the men laugh as she arranges her son’s toy cars to show how the dance will begin. But they also listen.
“I don’t know how you can put music to what we do,” Moore said. “I definitely don’t have the mindset to put it all together like she does.”
Putting together a project of this magnitude takes money that a nonprofit like Forklift Danceworks doesn’t have. Just like her dancers, Orr reaches out to the community for support in funding. The company began a Kickstarter campaign asking for $15,000 to help pay for the live orchestra and original music, and thanked donors through social media to keep it fresh on people’s news feeds. The project was fully funded on April 18 and has now reached over $20,000. Orr said a launch party helped bring in 30 percent of needed donations within the campaign’s first 24 hours.
“Most people want to fund a winning thing, so you want to look strong from the beginning,” she said. “It’s been very helpful for us as a nonprofit.”
Now that the stress of funding the project is over, Orr is focusing on rehearsals and possibilities for future projects (she’s currently in talks with a baseball team as well as cowboys in West Texas.) When PowerUP takes stage next month, she hopes that people walk away understanding what goes on behind turning on a light and thinking, “Whoa, that was bad ass.”
“I want them to leave feeling like they’ve seen something beautiful and artistically unforgettable,” Orr said. “For them to see we really are connected in this way and that we should not take for granted the people who do it every day.”+
The employees of Austin Energy will perform PowerUP at the grounds of the Travis County Expo Center on September 21 and 22. The performances are free but reservations are required and will be made available on www.forkliftdanceworks.org in early September. More information about the dance company, the project and its Kickstarter is also available on the site.
Photos by Josette Chen