New dance company to provide performances in normally-quiet summer months
Deos Contemporary Ballet was founded by Grand Rapids native Tess Sinke, whose health diagnosis of two disorders steered her dance career from performing to choreography. They have their inaugural performance this June, titled “An Evening of Brahms.”
Summers are a typically a down time for many professional dancers, university dance students, and those at private dance studios, as many dance organizations and programs go on hiatus until the fall. Such is the case locally as well, resulting in a noticeable lack of summer opportunities for Grand Rapidians to take in dance performances.
Enter Deos Contemporary Ballet, a professional troupe looking to help fill that performance vacuum. The fledgling summer-only troupe made up of 11 dancers from seven states includes collegiate dancers as well as professionals from Saint Louis Ballet, Fort Wayne Ballet, Columbia City Ballet and Grand Rapids Ballet. The company will present its inaugural production, “An Evening of Brahms,” June 15 & 16 at downtown’s Peter Martin Wege Theatre.
Founded by Grand Rapids native Tess Sinke, “Deos,” which is Latin for “the gods,” is a faith-directed dance company with a secular artistic approach.
“We are not a religious organization,” says Sinke. “Anyone can dance with us and we don’t present Christian-based or liturgical dance works. Faith is very important to me and I wanted to have something in our name as a reminder that we need to run this company with integrity and love, and treat every dancer that works with us kindly.”
Sinke, the second oldest of five in an artistic family, began dancing at age 3 after a performance of Grand Rapids Ballet’s “The Nutcracker” inspired her to want to be up on stage.
“My parents believed that the arts were important in our lives,” she says. “So when I said I wanted to dance they were all for it.”
Sinke received the bulk of her dance training at the Grand Rapids Ballet School and at Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pennsylvania where she earned a BA in dance choreography and religious studies. She is currently a dance instructor and resident choreographer for Turning Pointe School of Dance’s professional training division in nearby Holland.
Faith in her beliefs and in herself played an even larger role in Sinke’s life after college when she was diagnosed with the genetic disorder Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS) that effectively ended her budding career as a dancer. The disorder, which affects the collagen of the connective tissue at a cellular level, has caused the 26-year-old many problems with her joints, ligaments, and internal organs. Add to that also being diagnosed with Dysautonomia, a disorder of autonomic nervous system, and Sinke has had to manage quite a lot to continue to pursue a career in dance.
“I can’t dance because of pain and dislocating joints but also because it causes my heart rate to rapidly rise,” says Sinke. “I start to sweat and my body goes into fight or flight mode to the extreme, often triggering an episode or fainting.”
While these disorders and their effects on her life have presented Sinke with a series of road blocks in her dance career, they did not end it. Rather, they steered her down another artistic route she had been passionate about since grade school — choreography.
“I knew that working in the arts is what I wanted to do so I just needed to skip the dancing part and jump right into choreography,” says Sinke.
And jump in she has. Where many young choreographers can spend days creating just a few minutes of dance steps and phrases, Sinke says choreography is something that comes quickly and easily to her. Sinke says she generally knows the thought process behind her creations ahead of being in the studio. She knows how the ballet will be laid out minute by minute with regard to patterning and dancer formations. She says she doesn’t create the actual dance steps, though, until she is in the studio working with the dancers.
Like one of her choreographic idols icon Paul Taylor, Sinke says she is a procrastinator by nature but rises to the occasion when pushed to meet a deadline and movement ideas flow from her.
For the 75-minute “An Evening of Brahms,” Sinke has choreographed two of the three contemporary ballets on the program.
The evening will open with a three minute yet-to-be-named piece by Attila Mosolygo, Grand Rapids Ballet School & Junior Company director. The work is set to the third movement of “Brahms Violin Sonata №3 in D Minor, Op. 108” and performed by a trio of dancers. That opening piece will be followed by Sinke’s 27-minute ballet “To Madness and Joy” for all 11 of the company’s dancers. Set to Brahms’ “Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77: I. Allegro non troppo,” the ballet takes its inspiration from Walt Whitman’s poem “One Hour to Madness and Joy,” in which Whitman “likens his sexual excitement and desire for passional abandonment to the powerful, liberating sense he experiences in raging storms,” writes David Kuebrich in the 2006 book “A Companion to Walt Whitman.” Sinke describes the ballet’s movement as energetic and grounded.The second half of the program will once again feature the full cast in another Sinke ballet. The 35-minute “Flight” is danced to four movements of Brahms’ ethereal “Ein Deutsches Requiem, Op. 45.”
“[The piece] is about my struggle with having to stop dancing and going through the stages of grief in accepting that I have a chronic illness while finding the renewal of strength to move forward,” says Sinke.
“An Evening of Brahms” will also be a family affair of sorts for Sinke, with younger sister Kate stage managing, younger sister Grace dancing, and husband Andrew handling the company’s finances.
Going forward, the plan is for Deos to remain a summer-only dance company but to grow into offering multiple programs over a two and a half month period from June to mid-August, says Sinke. She’s working to offer dancers work opportunities when they most need it—during their summer layoffs—while also not competing with Grand Rapids’ other dance organizations during the rest of the year.
As the company’s mission states: “if we invest and take care of our dancers, our dancers will invest in and take care of the community.”
Deos Contemporary Ballet’s “An Evening of Brahms”
Friday, June 15, 7 p.m.
Saturday, June 16 , 3 p.m. & 7 p.m.
Peter Martin Wege Theatre
341 Ellsworth SW, downtown
Tickets $30 each
Purchase tickets online
