Verdigris Ensemble adds dance to a new restaging of ‘Shams'

Two years after Verdigris Ensemble’s evocative world premiere of Shams, the Dallas choral ensemble is restaging the immersive production and adding a new element: live dance by Bruce Wood Dance Dallas. This new production will run May 23-25 at the Moody Performance Hall in the Dallas Art District.

“When you live it and experience it and have it in your bones, all of a sudden you have a greater perspective and understanding of the piece and what the music is actually saying,” said Sam Brukhman, Verdigris Ensemble’s Artistic Director.

Shams is a 55-minute songbook based on the story of Rumi, a 13^th century poet and Sufi mystic, and his 40-day relationship with his spiritual mentor Shams Tabrizi. The work focuses on the transformative love that resulted in Rumi’s philosophical revolution. Produced in collaboration with the Crow Museum of Asian Art, this new production of Shams combines dance with music by Iranian-American composer Sahba Aminikia and visual art by Iranian-American artist Sara Baumann. Rumi’s poetry is set to music in its original Farsi, as translated by Zara Houshmand.

“We have all sorts of creatives in the room from all sorts of different backgrounds – you have a musician, you have a composer, you have a choreographer, you have a visual artist, you have a lighting designer – who are all contributing creatively to that process which mean all of sudden, the smartest person in the room is the room. When you have that,” Brukhman said. “There’s something magical that happens and I would argue that magic is transpiring within this artistic collaboration right now.”

Joy Bollinger, Bruce Wood Dance Dallas’ Artistic Director and the choreographer for this production, saw the 2023 world premiere of Shams.

“I had an immediate visceral response to the sounds that I was hearing. I remember I froze in my chair. I felt like I stopped breathing for 55 minutes because it was so powerful, so compelling,’ Bollinger said.

Bollinger could see the potential for dance in Shams.

“Even hearing it the first time, you could see movement, you could visualize movement, you could feel what be just in the space of the theater,” Bollinger said.

Meetings with the original creators of the piece helped Bollinger figure out how to incorporate 15 dancers into the work.

“It’s a patchwork, it’s a quilt. You’re sewing something with other people,” Bollinger said. “They gave me a wealth of knowledge on the front end, which was really helpful in terms of planning visuals, planning where those visuals would even be presented in the space like the cyc [cyclorama] at the back of the theater versus the scrim, where the choir could be in relation to the dancers, pretty much creating a map of the entire work before I even started the creation process with the dancers, “ Bollinger said.

Verdigris Ensemble’s 16 singers have been onstage with dance companies, including Bruce Wood Dance Dallas, for previous productions. Brukhman is eager to see how the dancers and singers will come together to tell this story.

“Verdigris is, at this point, not a stranger to movement to choreography. We’re always doing things in service to a story,” Brukhman said. “There will be moments where singers interact with dancers.”

Throughout the process, there has been an emphasis on creating a unifying force to bring these artists together on the stage: breath.

“When you are expressing something as a whole that will outshine anything an individual has to offer and when you take the time to coalesce in that way and use breath as a tool, it does fantastic job of doing that in music and in dance,” Bollinger said.

“It’s really important for us to find the commonalities that bind us together, because that’s what makes something a living and breathing entity. Once that happens, there there’s no separation between dancers and projections and art. It’s just one thing and once you view it as one thing, that’s when the real story starts to come out,” Brukhman said.

Kent Barker

Kent Barker

After working on Shams for years, Brukhman still marvels at Rumi’s story of transformation.

“What Shams means to me is the ability to love and the ability show how to love people, and how to evolve and change as a human to be able to continue to love,” Brukhman said.

The power of human connection Bollinger experienced in the 2023 production shapes her approach to this restaging.

“I felt love in that show. I felt longing, I felt pain and then resilience and a release of all that in a transcending moment as well,” Bollinger said. “If you have the ability to meet someone, to meet a person, to have an experience, to have something touch you and change how you do something for the better, that’s the greatest thing.”

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