Early in her career, Trina Frómeta started her own school, Taller D’ Movimientos, and a touring company, Proyecto Movimiento, which took her to Cuba, Germany and India. Nic Coury
On a humid summer day, Dominican-born big-band conductor Billo Frómeta was arranging songs in his mountainside home in Caracas, Venezuela. As he sat at his piano, piecing together notes, his ears perked up. He was listening closely to the ruckus of the chicharras (cicadas) singing outside. Out of the possible thousands of insects outside of his window, he honed in on one. And he fumed.
“Oh, he was so angry,” his daughter Trina Frómeta recalls. “The insect was out of tune!”
For Frómeta, a 56-year-old choreographer now based in Carmel, growing up in Caracas was filled with all sorts of sounds and colors. She came from an artistic background. Her father was a popular composer and her mother, Haydée Grillo, was an opera singer and children’s book author. Today, Frómeta still draws on her parents for inspiration in her choreography, but she didn’t train strictly as a dancer growing up. She explored gymnastics and singing and, eventually, dance.
“The vein was always in me,” she says of her late start in dance.
She was pursuing a degree in graphic design at Jacksonville University in Florida when she made a leap, majoring in dance instead. With her degree she moved back to Caracas and danced professionally. She toured with them for four years, until she began choreography and teaching.
After decades of teaching, she was awarded a full scholarship in 2015 from the Mark Morris Dance Group in Brooklyn to teach a dance class for people with Parkinson’s disease at the Carmel Academy of Performing Arts.
Her life is a whirlwind of globetrotting, but as Frómeta puts it, “dance is all about movement.”
Weekly: What was it like growing up in Venezuela?
Frómeta: It was awesome. Not so much now when you see the news, it’s so sad and horrible. But when I was growing up, it was a rich country. “Rich,” not just because of the oil, but because we had the forest and the mountains. Our house was in the mountains, but the Caribbean Sea was only 30 minutes away. I was always near the sunset and the sunrise.
What about growing up with artistic parents?
My father was pretty famous in our country, and when we’d walk together in the streets, you couldn’t walk two meters without someone recognizing him. He would play everywhere, and for everyone, too. It wasn’t just celebration for the very top-class people, but also for low-income people. I think the key to his songs was that he developed a style that’s easy to enjoy and everyone could dance to.
My mother is an inspiration for me today too, not only because of her singing her abilities. She was a children’s book author, and when I started to choreograph, I’d translate her books into dance.
What’s it like teaching older students who have physical barriers?
When I received my training for Dancing for Parkinson’s, the first thing they told me was that they’re not your patients, and [choreographers] aren’t doctors. So I treat them like dancers.
But Parkinson’s disease can be physically demanding of people. So is dance.
As I see it, dance has two branches: the physical arm and the social arm. Dance for Parkinson’s is the social arm.
Everyone has a range of motion, even if you’re in a wheelchair. So because we can’t start from the basics like ballet, we start with their memories. And when you challenge them to think, they begin to relax and feel and move from the inside. Dance first comes from within, and then it’s movement.
You’d be surprised: Once you get people with Parkinson’s thinking, oh boy do they move!
What about dance do you think allows it to transcend generations and even abilities?
In my years touring, I’ve been to something like 50 countries, with people who speak different languages. But choreography has no words. You don’t have to speak the language to understand and read the body. Choreography only has images. And as they say, an image is worth a thousand words.
No comments:
Post a Comment