Dance Program’s ‘Salad Days’

“Salad Days” aren’t just dinners in the dining hall when the hot meal seems less than appealing. A phrase first penned by Shakespeare, “Salad Days” is also the title choreographer Sara Hook gave to the production comprised of seven of her short, satirical dances that took place Saturday evening at the Harvard Dance Center. In addition to being the Harvard Dance Program’s opening production this season, “Salad Days” was first show entirely made up of pieces choreographed by Hook.

The oldest of the evening’s dances were first performed in 1998, while Hook also included one world premiere, itself titled “Salad Days.” The show featured Mary Cochran, Paige Cunningham, Angela Fleddermann Miller, David Parker, and Erika Randall.

All of the dancers have worked extensively with Hook in the past, and all of them are also close friends. For instance, the choreographer and Mary Cochran, a former soloist with Paul Taylor Dance Company, have been friends since high school. David Parker is another longtime friend. “We’ve collaborated on a lot of work, and we’re really close friends,” Hook says of him. “He’s a Boston native, and our work has similar aesthetic trajectories and inquiry with building movement language that reconsiders relationships between body parts and has the ambition to be expressive and emotional.”

Cunningham acknowledges how Hook has broadened her dancing. “I love that [Hook’s style] is very technical and dance-y, and that’s my passion,” she says. “We come from different places in approaching the movement. She’s shaped my dancing a bit. I tend to be more rigid as a mover, and Sara has brought in a little more depth.” Erika Randall agrees: “Even when you work alone, she’s in your head.”

Cochran performed in five of the night’s seven works, opening the show with “Patriot Act UP,” a dance that demands both a credible acting performance and impressive technical precision. Hook explains that “Patriot Act UP,” set to traditional American songs by Morton Gould and John Philip Sousa, was intended to be a political commentary questioning the package of patriotism. Cochran communicated the playful satire by producing props from her costume such as a lollipop, a toy flag, and a noisemaker as the tune suddenly changed patriotic music to gunshots at the end of the piece.

“It’s titled ‘Salad Days’ because I noticed I have an interest in conjuring memory in my pieces,” Hook says. “Our culture seems to want to pinpoint an era of time. I feel like there’s a tragedy in that concept. Both humor and tragedy in that concept.”

Although each work can be interpreted several ways, Hook emphasizes that her choreography is not meant to be message-oriented. “There are so many layers and ways [the audience] can relate,” she says.

“It’s a blend of obsession with physical virtuosity,” Hook says of her new work. “Something very frank and at the same time very surreal. It’s partly a reaction to the times, but also a development of my confidence. It’s less a caricature and much more the situation evoked from embracing movement and technique. In some ways, it’s not what’s the trend. Technique and the exploration doesn’t have to have an illustrative result, but it can have an authentic, expressive, vulnerable result.”

“I thought the performers were fantastic, and the choreography was unique, with a lot of things I’ve never seen before on the stage,” says Elizabeth Bergmann, director of the Harvard dance program.

As for how her choreography has evolved since she began in the late ’80s, Hook reflects, “I think there’s no linear progression between work of ten years ago and now, but I do see that there is something in my new work that’s pleasing me.”