Learning from Heartbreak (and Bon Iver) in Nova Linea Contemporary Dance’s ‘Love is a Game’

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Photo by Andrea Cavaliere

Love is a Game by Nova Linea Contemporary Dance Company

Nova Linea Contemporary Dance Company performs 'Love is a Game'

The young Nova Linea Contemporary Dance Company presented the second major show of its fourth season at the Marcus Performing Arts Center’s Wilson Theatre in early April. The concert shared its title, “Love is a Game,” with the first of its two one-act dance works, a unique kind of story-theater response to an entire album of songs by the English artist Adele. Nova Linea’s founder and artistic director Jared Baker choreographed it with the company in 2022. This was a revisiting, he says, of his company’s biggest hit.

The evening’s second half was a world premiere by Baker titled this (an excavation). It’s a unique kind of metaphoric response to an entire album of songs by the Wisconsin artist Justin Vernon, better known as Bon Iver.

Baker jokingly compared the first piece to a Hollywood blockbuster easy to absorb, and the second to an experimental indie film you have to think about. The movement style of both works is standard for Nova Linea: full-bodied, high energy, jazz-influenced, born of and tied to its music, and virtuosic in execution.

Loss and Heartbreak

For those who, like me, enjoyed Nova Linea’s first concert at the Marcus Center last fall, this show was a kind of second chapter to story about dealing with loss and heartbreak. The earlier show was a two-act dance titled Some Wounds Never Heal. Any hopeful ending we might have anticipated was denied to its grieving protagonist despite Herculean efforts by friends to lift her spirits and help her move forward.

For this show, Adele’s very personal album, titled 30, was composed for her young son to help him understand why she’d divorced his dad after unhappy years of marriage. She hoped the album would help the boy heal as he grew older.

Likewise, Vernon created the songs in his debut Bon Iver album after a painful break-up with his girlfriend and his first band. Bon Iver translates as “bad winter,” a winter Vernon spent after returning from North Carolina to his hometown of Eau Claire, Wisconsin to recover from those break-ups. He spent that winter alone in a cabin in the woods composing, singing, playing every instrument, and recording this album. He titled it For Emma, Forever Ago. The poetry is spare, somewhat opaque, but suggests in the final song a resolution built on love.

Every Moment Mattered

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Photo by Andrea Cavaliere

Love is a Game by Nova Linea Contemporary Dance Company

Nova Linea Contemporary Dance Company perform 'Love is a Game'

And Baker’s choreography is built on love for these artists and albums, and for his very fine company of 10 dancers. There were passages in both dances that were so thrilling, so ferociously performed, that the audience would break into applause in the midst of the action. The dancers never broke focus at such times. Clearly, every moment mattered.

The “Hollywood blockbuster” thrills of the show’s first half had a lot to do with Adele’s timeless songs and heart-warming singing. As Baker choreographed it, we can identify four characters: the mom when she was young and fell in love; the troubled mom today who hopes her son will understand; the son she loves and hopes to win forgiveness from; and the ex-husband who is mostly now a haunting memory.

It's all there in the dancing and acting. I found myself identifying with the mother’s sense that she was not just an innocent victim, that she has to take some real responsibility and thereby maybe free herself. The other seven dancers somehow help to dramatize that struggle. All the movements flow, often fast, sometimes athletic, with very little repetition, and in time with the music. The theme is clear by the end: we screw up, it’s complicated, but we can learn and grow up.

Ready for the World

This dance drama is ready for a world tour.

The Bon Iver album is much lighter in instrumentation. Vernon sings in high falsetto. Recovery is less a present-tense drama than a matter for analysis: how to get out of the hole you’re in.

The female protagonist lies buried under a heap of costumes that she and the other dancers have removed and discarded. The soles of her bare feet are all that’s visible for much of the dance. The protagonist could represent anyone in need of self-excavation after a major life defeat. Or it could be about the need to sleep at night when that’s impossible. There’s fighting, punching, pushing. Dancers stuff the worn-out costumes into sacks with cords, and leave them for the central figure to try to manage, maybe somehow learn from.

In his talk-back, Baker spoke of the need to re-bury yourself in past pain to learn while self-excavating.

As is his custom, Baker ended the show with a talk-back. He is, after all, a nationally known dance teacher. The all-ages audiences at the shows I’ve attended held many students. It’s not unusual for applause to break out in the middle of a dance phrase, but the dancers never break their concentration.