Dance - Hit the road, jack

Little boys in large shoulder pads scrimmage in the football fields below, their parents shouting out with more enthusiasm per capita than you’re ever likely to find at a Falcons game. The rain and tornadoes spawned by Hurricane Katrina passed through only two days ago, but today the sun sets in a bright, white-gold sky over Gresham Park in south DeKalb County. The air is clean. Ants crawl on the picnic table. On a hilltop, among a grove of ancient, gnarled trees, dancers dressed in dirt-smudged white sweep the bark with pine needle brooms. A woman walking her dog passes slowly by, circles, sits, walks by again.

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What? Oh, the dancers. Not part of the scene you expect in your local park? If you live in DeKalb County, you better get used to it. Many more such dances are planned for the months to come.

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Beacon Dance artistic director D. Patton White has lived in DeKalb County for 25 years, but a little more than a year ago, he realized that he barely knew his community outside his limited stomping grounds, where he creates and performs his epic experimental modern dances. He had always been fascinated by maps, so he set out to map the county he calls home (with a few excursions into Fulton as well), adapting the tools of choreography to his exercise in cartography, while bringing dance to people and places that might not otherwise experience it. So began The Mapping Project.

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At last year’s Decatur Arts Festival, White asked passers-by to draw their neighborhoods on big sheets of newsprint. He asked them for directions to various DeKalb landmarks and videotaped their responses, which he incorporated into a solo dance. Then he started thinking bigger. He took out a map of the county and planned an ambitious dancing tour of south DeKalb, a series of site-specific works developed through improvisation and collaboration with his company of dancers. Each dance is an opportunity to know a new place. (“I’ve been down roads I’ve never been down before,” says dancer Ann Ritter, who, like White, has lived in DeKalb for 25 years.) Each dance is inspired by and unique to its space.

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There’s a lot of talk in the world of literature about “writing with a sense of place,” the idea that where a story happens is part of that story, that — infinitely repeated Wal-Marts and McDonald’s notwithstanding — each place has its own singular spirit and voice. In contrast, dance is typically designed with little more than a sense of the width and depth of a black box stage, allowing the company to tour the same movement to virtually any venue that comes calling.

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Not so with The Mapping Project. Take the Gresham Park dance out of that grove, and half the dancers — the 40-foot-tall ones — are missing and not easily replaced by understudies. Same thing if you take away the granite outcroppings and pools of elf orpine from the Mount Arabia dance or the tombstones from the Oakland Cemetery dance. The performances are being videotaped for future use in a multimedia dance piece that will be able to travel. But the genius of the dances is born from and best experienced in place.

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So here’s the challenge to you, dear reader: To see these dances as the series continues, you’ll have to venture outside of your own familiar spaces and go down roads you’ve never been down before. It’s worth the trip, but you better bring a map.