Douglas celebrates 15 years of non-stop dance

Douglas Nierras’ Powerdance is celebrating 15 glorious years with its annual dance concert at the Main Theater – Tanghalang Nicanor Abelardo, no less – of the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

This year’s dance concert, set on Saturday, Nov. 9, 8 p.m., asks the rhetorical question Can Everybody (Power) Dance?

The answer, of course, is a resounding yes.

Just ask Douglas Nierras, indefatigable founder, artistic director, and choreographer of the country’s leading contemporary dance company.

"With this year’s concert, we are not going for anything high falutin," Douglas explains. "It all boils down to choices."

"That’s the whole gist, the whole concept of the concert," Douglas elaborates. "Even if you are a doctor, a teacher, whatever your profession is, if the desire to dance is there, you can very well dance."

For this Herculean undertaking, Douglas has gathered for the first time 22 dancers (the biggest set of dancers in their 15 years), to interpret with their fluid body movements the concert’s recurring question: Can Everybody (Power) Dance?

Adding color and texture to this dance experience is the inclusion of non-professional dancers among the usual Powerdance troupe.

"We have a sales person, a high school teacher, and a pharmaceutical executive with us," Douglas relates. "Also joining us onstage is a broadcaster and TV hos, Chiqui Roa-Puno."

That is precisely Douglas’s point in mounting this anniversary concert.

"I purposefully included non-professionals," Douglas remarks. "So that the audience will see that even ordinary people, the so-called non-professional dancers, can dance side by side with Powerdance. They are in the same category, in the same delineation. Like what I always tell them, once you step inside a dance studio, you’re a dancer!"

Douglas himself knows just how compelling, how irresistible this passion for dance is.

He, in fact, was on his first year of medical studies when the love for dance lured him onstage.

It’s not a case of choosing dance, as far as Douglas was concerned.

"Dance chose me," he quips.

In the middle of his medicine proper, Douglas found himself on the crossroads. He asked himself the inevitable query: "What would I be happy doing, even if I become poor?"

It was more than the sheer joy of dance, Douglas insists. "It’s the completion of life. I can only compare it to touching the face of God."

Indeed, he can only describe it in spiritual terms.

"Unavoidably so," he affirms. "There is no creative process I know that precludes spirituality. You have to realize that the creativity doesn’t stem from you. It comes from a Higher Power."

For Can Everybody (Power) Dance?, Douglas has whipped up another fine creation that includes seven scintillating suites – or what Douglas fondly calls "an aggrupation of music and dances."

"Three of our old pieces, we are redoing this year," Douglas volunteers. Not only due to insistent public demand but because Douglas feels that these suites have become part of the Powerdance repertoire and should be seen by the new (and youthful) audiences who watch their concerts every year.

Douglas Nierras’ Powerdance was the recipient of the Grand Prix at the 10th Saitama International Creative Dance Concourse in Yono City, Japan, in 1999, for their intense piece Sayaw ng Puso at Kaluluwa.

The three Powerdance classics Douglas included in this year’s lineup for the young members of the audience are Basil Suite: Buhay, Hapis at Pag-Ibig... Ngayon at Kailanman, the Coroner’s Report, and Contemplaciones Sobre una Flor Filipina.

Also not to be missed are the four new suites Powerdance has created especially for this year’s anniversary dance concert.

"Even the manner of presenting the pieces is different," Douglas divulges. It’s far from the traditional ("and the curtain will lift and all the dancers are lined up onstage") method.

"It’s all new," Douglas says with pride. "There will be bridges between the suites. Annotation. What is left unsaid at the end of the last piece would be said in the next. It’s like we’re weaving the different suites together. There’s a continuing flow. But the concert’s thesis is really all about choices."

And Douglas chose dancing over medicine because for him it’s as essential as eating and breathing. "If I give up dance, it’s like being cut off from my air flow," Douglas avows.

Dance is not just life’s work; it’s his lifeblood.

Can Everybody (Power) Dance? is supported by PLDT Power Convergence, Centrum MultiVitamins from A to Zinc, MC Home Depot, Lactacyd Feminine Wash, Shangri-La Plaza Mall, Novellino Wine, Ratsky, Tower Records, Pinoymail, Today newspaper, Crossover 105.1, [email protected], RJ100 and NU107. For ticket inquiries and reservations, call the Powerdance Studio at 633-6417. Tickets are also available at Tower Records Makati and Alabang and a Music One (MI) Megamal, Greenbelt 3, and Quezon Avenue.