PearsonWidrig DanceTheater will premiere work celebrating 25th anniversary of Bates Dance Festival

LEWISTON – Choreographer Sara Pearson measured the falling rain with an open hand and gathered her dancers. They were tougher than a few sprinkles, she figured.

Then, the clouds opened. The downpour forced the petite artist, shrouded beneath a yellow slicker, to retreat indoors with her sopping wet dancers.

“It’s crazy out here,” Pearson said.

Steam heat, torrential rain, bees and even ducks had disrupted rehearsals for her dance project, an installation at Bates College’s Lake Andrews to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Bates Dance Festival.

“People think site-specific work is a piece of cake,” she grumbled as she walked to a nearby building. Inside, nine dancers worked through a routine meant to be done among the tall pines beside the campus pond.

And Pearson’s mood improved.

After watching several run-throughs, in which the nine danced with each other and the trees, she was jubilant.

“Good. Very nice. Beautiful!” she said. “It just got stronger and stronger.”

Of course, she had little tweaks to make. She wanted a quicker pop to a shift in posture on the floor. And when the group seemed to look too synchronized as members fell down, she aimed to make them look more random and organic.

The image in her mind? Raindrops.

The dance installation is scheduled to premiere Thursday and to be performed again Friday, almost one year after Pearson and her co-director, Patrik Widrig, first sat silently beside the pond at Bates and listened.

“Our whole creative process is about listening,” Pearson said.

She compares their work to both archaeology and midwifery, in which the job is about birthing someone else’s creation.

“It’s about discovering what’s already there,” she said. At Bates, the pair sat for two hours.

“Then, we walked around the pond and talked to each other,” she said. Ideas were floated and then sunk as they considered cost or, in some cases, danger to the dancers.

“Some of the ideas we had to let go were great,” she said.

In the end, the Manhattan-based directors settled on a three-part show with about 25 dance students and another 25 performers from the Lewiston-Auburn area and Portland.

The first section will have dancers popping up all around the audience, seated at the school’s outdoor amphitheater. The second will feature a dozen different performances encircling the pond. Audience members will walk around the pond, like attendees at the midway of a county fair, Pearson said.

For the final section, the audience will be back at the amphitheater and the dancers will inhabit a man-made island in the pond.

“It’s probably the biggest project I’ve ever attempted,” said Pearson, who has worked between 16 and 18 hours a day for the past three weeks, since rehearsals began. That followed many hours of preparation, including meetings with composer Robert Een. Some of his initial work, recorded in his kitchen, was used in rehearsals.

Een, a cellist, is scheduled to accompany the performance with a small orchestra and an original composition.

Pearson has lofty hopes for the work.

She imagines people leaving with a different appreciation of nature – of trees, water and air.

“Hopefully, it moves in you and through you,” she said. “It’s weird. It’s mystical. It’s spiritual. It’s beautiful.”