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Recently installed as artistic director of Sanspointe Dance Company, Rhea Speights (pronounced Ray Spites) is managing a company that can’t be tied down to a studio.  Its stages have moved from its home base at Children’s Dance Foundation to Railroad Park and the lobby of the Birmingham Museum of Art.  Next month the company will explore outer space.  Sort of.

Speights brings impressive credentials to the position — training at the American Dance Festival, Limon Institute and the University of Alabama, presenting her choreography in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Iowa and New York.  Last year, she danced solo to her own choreography and earned a spot as a finalist in the National Society of Arts and Letters national competition.

Like many modern dance choreographers, Speights uses the air above the stage as much as the stage itself, but her collaborative work with Lynn Andrews takes dance to new heights.  “Golden Record” will use sounds and images that were launched into space by two Voyager spacecraft in 1977.  Meant to portray life and culture on Earth, the record is intended to be heard and seen by extraterrestrial life, as well as future earthbound societies.

Voyager is expected to reach the nearest star in 40,000 years, but you won’t have to wait that long to hear the music and see the dance.  “Golden Record” will be performed May 21, 22 and 29 at 6 p.m.  Itineraries, respectively, are three Birmingham libraries — Five Points West, Central and Avondale.

The first time I ever danced was:
I should probably just quote Marc Bolan and say “I danced myself outside the womb.”  My mom enrolled me in baby ballet just like every other middle-class girl in this country.

At what point does a person transition from a little middle class girl dabbling in dance to an adult in the dance world?
I suppose like any addiction, it begins recreationally and slowly takes over your life.  Dancing felt good, so I kept up with it.  At age 12, I took a choreography workshop and I was won over by the challenge of expressing ideas through movement in space over time.  I have other interests and considered other careers.  Making dances wouldn’t let me go.  I keep making work and showing work and the financial side of it gets pieced together by luck or magic or something else I don’t understand.  I live a charmed life; I do not make a lot of money.

What’s more important, the choreography or the dancers?
It’s a truly collaborative effort, but really good dancers will not save empty choreography.

Ballet or hip-hop?
Yes, and tap and jazz and modern and folk.  Use all of it.

Martha Graham or Merce Cunningham?
Well, they’re both dead, so I put them both in the same camp of folks who aren’t doing anything new.  Of the oh-so-great-American-modern-dance-techniques-developed-by-people-who-are-dead, my preference is for Doris Humphrey/Jose Limon because the qualities of suspension and rebound (a method using momentum and the body’s weight for movement) feel good to me.  Living dance artists who interest me are Tere O’Connor, Miguel Gutierrez and Sarah Michelson.  We’re all indebted to Cunningham, and Cunningham is indebted to Graham, and Graham and Humphrey danced together for Ruth St. Denis.  We’re all one great big family.

“So You Think You Can Dance” or “Great Performances”?
Once I met a man who called the former “So You Think You Can (expletive) in Your Pants.”  Unfortunately, he was already married.

The best part about my job is:
Anything can be an idea for a dance.  I get to study myriad topics according to my whim and when someone asks me what I’m doing, I can honestly answer, “work.”

The most influential artist in my life is:
Mother Nature, for realz.

The best music to choreograph is:
Music and dance aren’t married.  They’re just close friends.  So mostly I choreograph to ideas.  Then I call up a close friend and ask if they’d like to play some music.

The best advice I ever received:
If you receive conflicting advice, try the one that appeals to you first.  If that doesn’t work, try something else.

In high school I was:
Quiet and nerdy.

The people I am most thankful to are:
My mom, who always says “be careful,” and my dad, who always says “have fun.”

One movie I could watch over and over is:
If I like a movie, I’m mostly willing to watch it over and over in one sitting.

My childhood nickname was:
It’s pretty easy to play around with my name. Sting-ray, Rhea of sunshine, or if you wanted to antagonize me, Diarrhea.

I was watching TV the other day and saw a Wendy’s commercial with a perky, cute redhead.  Something in the back of my brain recognized her right away, but I couldn’t quiiite place her.  A few clicks on Google (one and two), and I figured it out: Morgan Smith.

Every actress aspires to grow up to be a “Hot Ad Girl“, right?  No matter, it’s fun to see people you (kinda) know or recognize on The Box.  Wishing more continued success for Birminghamian art-letes.

Update: There are at least two more of these Wendy’s ads (one and two).

“I’m a real believer in that creativity comes from limits, not freedom.  Freedom, I think you don’t know what to do with yourself.  But when you have a structure, then you can improvise off it . . . .”  - Jon Stewart

First, the choreographer has to work with people.  And people’s bodies – both physically and mentally – can’t just do anything you ask them to.  Even specially trained people like ballet dancers.  People aren’t cartoons.  Not only that, but even the Alabama Ballet itself has a range of dancers.  As good as they can be, it’s no insult to observe that it isn’t the Paris Opera Ballet School with breathtaking talent top-to-bottom.

Second, it’s got to be dance – and specifically ballet.  I’m still entirely unsure how to answer the question of what makes something “ballet”, rather than some other kind of dance.  Do the girls have to be en pointe?  Is it more about including certain things or exluding certain things?  How far away can something get from buns and tutus and still be considered “ballet”?  Do there have to be lifts?  I know there are lines somewhere in there, but no one’s yet explained it to my satisfaction.  Whether I understand it or not, a ballet choreographer is obviously familiar with those boundaries and creates with a thorough understanding of them.  If you made me responsible, any result would be the equivalent of a 4 year old coloring the Captain D’s mat with crayons – I just don’t understand where the lines are or what they’re for.  About the dance specifically, Frederick Lee Rocas made a terrific White Rabbit and executed the perfect harried scamper.

Another subtle constraint in choreography must be the costumes.  One of my favorite parts of this performance was the wonderful animal costumes borrowed from the Texas Ballet Theater.  Unicorn, Rooster, Dog, Dodo Bird, Platypus, and many more.  Oh dear, oh my.  Do the dancers get to pick which animal they’re going to be?  Make requests?  Who gets to be Mr. Black?  Or is it more like: “You over there – you’re the Dodo Bird.”  You gotta to make sure your dancers can see in those big feathery masks and leap with big, floppy ears.

The third major constraint is the story itself.  Here, we’ve got Alice in Wonderland (AKA Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) and every American over the age of ten is familiar with at least some version.  As a writer and word person, I wondered immediately how a dance company can do Alice, since I think the main features of the book are the cleverness of the nonsense along with the word- and logic-play.  What’s really left without the words?  So it’s got to look like Alice, without any of the words.  That’s tough sledding.  With some imagination or creativity, it wouldn’t have to look like the Disney version or even the Carroll version, but it’s still got to feel like Alice.

There were plenty of opportunities for cleverness and play.  Alice was apparently picking up steps from all the characters she met.  She got smaller on stage (because the table got bigger).  The Caterpillar, I believe, was crawlingly pulled along the stage by a hidden rope.  The tea party was mad enough.  Undoubtedly, my favorite part of the night was the visual of and interraction between the King of Hearts (Kelly Walsh Alexander) and the Queen of Hearts (Benjamin Linn).

Fourth, the music.  Here’s where the choreographer’s job must get head-spinningly tough.  Though some might earnestly believe that the marriage of music and dance isn’t terribly important, that point might be up for debate.  Unless the audience is full of specialists, a choreographer has to be aware that people usually understand content by filtering both visuals and audio.  If the music is light and happy, it’s disconcerting to have your dancers fighting – unless you planned it that way.  When the music is angsty, serious, and dissonant, the audience will likely feel confused unless the action on stage relates – unless you planned it that way.  To make dance is hard; making dance match music is even harder.  Ask any television or movie director whether the choice of music matters.

Finally, the audience.  As if the choreographer didn’t already have enough people to try to please, there’s the teensy weensy matter of the ticket-paying audience and the kids and their parents and the critics and the board and the sponsors.  The dance already has to use dancers to do ballet to live music in a way that’s faithful to Alice, but it’s also got to provide a credible and entertaining story.  Dance, independent of an audience, in unfulfilling.  Alice, the protagonist, has to go through some sort of hero’s journey.  There’s got to be tension and conflict.  Not all the characters in the book were friendly or nice.  Even kids will recognize that there’s not much of a story if she just sits there and enjoys the show.

I’m not naturally a dancer or a dance observer, but the more I go, the more I have a sincere appreciation for all the people that make it work.  In many ways, dance may be the great mother of all art.

All thanks to Katy Olsen, the Alabama Ballet, and the Alabama Symphony Orchestra.  Live music makes everything better.

The recent Theatre Downtown production of Hamlet (with audience attendance at about 50%) made me imagine all the other historical productions of Hamlet since its creation in the early 1600s.  I’m sure the play has been produced by everything from well-funded groups to schoolkids.  How many other plays have been performed for 400 years?

“Tis a knavish piece of work, but what of that?”

And that question led me to pose a completely trivial question: What are the odds that you’re related to someone that’s performed a role in Hamlet?  Let’s do some back of the envelope math….

“I hope all will be well.”

How to even approach this problem?  Let’s take a wild guess at how many people have performed in Hamlet since 1600.  The Theatre Downtown production listed 17 actors.  You can do it with more and you can do it with less, so it’s a decent assumption.  This is the only Hamlet in Alabama I know about this year, but I’m going to guess that someone else is probably doing it too, so I’m guessing there are 2 Hamlets for all of Alabama in 2012.  Alabama’s got about 5 million people and America’s got about 300 million people.

So now we can extrapolate like crazy.  Now I think Alabama is probably less theatrical than average (so it makes this particular estimate conservative), but I can assume that if Alabama has 2 Hamlets for 5 million people, then there might have been 120 or so Hamlets produced in all of America in 2012.  If there were 120 Hamlets in America in 2012, that’s something like 2000 actors.  If you performed in a Hamlet in 2012, you’re a member of a fairly small fraternity.

“Denmark’s a prison.”

Here’s where it gets fun.  (Well, fun if you’re a dork.)  The current world population is about 7 billion, but the world population in 1600 was something like 550 million.  The English-speaking population of the world is currently somewhere between around 400 million and 1 billion, depending on how you count it.  I’ll guess halfway at about 700 million.  So I can guesstimate that the English-speaking population of the world in the year 1600 was around 60 million.

With 700 million current English speakers, there might be 280 worldwide Hamlets this year.  Now, this is probably flat wrong, but if there were 60 million English-speaking people in 1600 then there might’ve been 24 Hamlets produced that year.  (See where I’m going with this?)  So if you assume steady, linear population growth (I know it’s not), then I calculate about 60,000 total Hamlets since 1600.  You put 17 actors in 60,000 Hamlets (not counting actors that have done it more than once) and that’s about 1 million Hamlet actors since the creation of the sweet prince.

“When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.”

Who was the 1 millionth actor and does that person get a prize?  I’m going to assume it was Nick Crawford as Hamlet in this Theatre Downtown production.  Congratulations!

“Why, what an ass am I!”

I’ve got to assume that you’re an English speaker if you’re reading this.  How many English speakers have there been since actors started to perform Hamlet?  Hmm…  That’s significantly harder than a guess at the number of Hamlet actors.

“All is not well.”

I found a figure of around 18 billion total people that have lived since 1600.  If one-tenth of those spoke English, then there might have been about 1.8 billion English speakers since 1600.  So the ratio of total Hamlet actors since 1600 (1 million) to total English speakers since 1600 is about 1-to-1800.  Again, that’s a very small fraternity.

So, how many people am I related to?  I think this is where this method might break down.  I’m not tremendously up to date on my family tree, but I can probably name 20 or so fairly close members.  How many people am I related to since 1600?  Oh heck, I don’t know.  Back to 1600 is about 20 generations or so.  The first generation backwards I’m directly related to my parents (2), the second generation back I’m directly related to my grandparents (4), the third I’m related to my great-grandparents (8), and this progression goes all the way back until I’m directly related to about a million people in 1600.  That can’t work like that, can it?  Does that mean all our families have had some light, superficial incest along the way?  Am I related to everybody?

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

Well, if I assume that every couple since 1600 had something like 2.2 kids (I have no idea), then 400 years of this compound interest process means I may be related to about 7 million other people in 2012.  That’s one of me and 7 million relatives.  So I’d say it’s very likely I’m related to a Hamlet actor.  But if I just count the 20 or so members of my immediate family, then it’s much less likely.  Well, that answer might be kind-of unsatisfying.  Like Hamlet, I’m not sure how to feel about that.

“Tis unmanly grief.”

Thanks very much to Billy Ray Brewton and Theatre Downtown.

• I Will Always Love You (Dolly Parton/Whitney Houston)
• Runaway (Kanye West)
• Tim McGraw (Taylor Swift)
• Letter People Main Theme