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Review: The Current Sessions

note: this review can also be found at 

http://www.dance-enthusiast.com/enthusiasts/reviews/view/118/

THE CURRENT SESSIONS: Sunday July 15^th, 7:30 pm

a review

Andrea Miller, choreographer and Artistic Director of the well-known contemporary dance company Gallim Dance was in the audience during Sunday night’s The CURRENT SESSIONS. Even though Miller was most likely there to support dancers and co-workers who were featured throughout the night, it was not hard to imagine that some of the dancers were using this performance as an informal audition for Gallim, which has its first female audition in three years soon (dancers, go ahead and search on dancenyc now, just finish reading this when you’re done).

In line with Gallim’s penchant for the physically improbable, many dances presented in The CURRENT SESSIONS were comfortable playing with extremes. The use of the instep as a viable support for body weight. The thighs splayed wide in fourth position, teasing the floor with the crotch. This is pure Gallim. Or, Gallim reflects a contemporary dance scene that is rapidly turning the new into the normal. But in spite of a sometimes-similar movement vocabulary, The CURRENT SESSIONS’ Sunday night performance (one of three separate compilations of choreographers that weekend) at The Wild Project was a showcase of “today’s best emerging contemporary choreographers.” One could feel their deep desire to differentiate themselves from their peers through different, bold choices.

One Side of the Story opens the show with a pawing, licking grace. It is sensual like a sleek cat is sensual, stretching nonchalantly then darting across the floor. The five female dancers performing for Yin Yue Dance (including Yin Yue) are alternately cool, relaxed and then in a moment they are muscular and taut. This is the most choreographed piece of the night, with clean unison displaying well-rehearsed movement.

Although still well rehearsed, the other pieces rely more on the dancers to create a sense of union within the choreography. Circumstantial Amy, choreographed by Brendan Duggan, transitions between sections with undirected stumbling. The dancers have to navigate around one another in the moment. The stumbling (which sometimes progresses into tripping…oops) seems vague and somewhat arbitrary.  When there is specific movement to work with – a bird-like flapping, a simple phrase— the dancers are finally able to respond to one another with intention.

Jonathan Royse Windham’s Two duets, some awkward moments, a long silence and a slow dance doesn’t even try to transition through the choreography: it stops the music and starts again. The playful structure of the piece, complete with hilarious, adolescent performances by decidedly mature performers, thrives when the eight dancers’ animated personalities react to external events according to their distinct characters. The overblown characters necessitate confident performers and Francesca Romo (with her silly side sneer) and the seven other dancers are satisfying to watch.

SHAPESHIFT, choreographed by Betheny Merola, uses two bodies as propellers. The dark-haired duo is a forceful instigator of coolly understated movement that often works its way towards a lift or roll. Mallory Rosenthal’s duet, As Our Buttons Are Cast in Bone needs less force and more space. The dance is a rippling extenuation of the two dancers’ first moment onstage and if it is the simplest piece, it is also the most kinesthetically conscious one in the show.  Performers Emily Terndrup and TJ Spaur, with their slightly rounded, thinking bodies, are self-aware to the point of excluding all else. The best and often repeated moment is when Terndrup opens her arms and her collarbone finally seeks something above. Even though it lasts only for a second, it seems forever that she dangles, her weight seeping off of suspended bones.

The seconds of beauty last longer in The Wild Project’s intimate theater than they might have in a larger venue. For this group of emerging choreographers, close up is good. It lets you see the beauty of dance that often comes in the form of distorted extremes. But they are distortions that are enticing and interesting and to watch. The physical courage of the dancers makes it clear that beauty is brave and uncontrollable and sometimes a little bit dirty.

Also included in this performance: Discontinue: Part II choreographed by Sarah Mettin/ Mettin Movement Collective and Lonely Woman choreographed by Theodora Boguszewski.

Review of Stephanie Batten Bland at Baryshnikov Arts Center - for New York Live Arts Writers Workshop with Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Moving Portraits

Stefanie Batten Bland has a strong internal rhythm, and that rhythm is unapologetically slow. The second weekend of her recent concert, performed at the Baryshnikov Arts Center May 18 and 19, was so slow as to be almost a still life. The seven dancers had more going for them than a bowl of fruit does, though. The dancers skittered and sashayed with an ease that seemed to say ‘duh, of course we can also do this,’ but predominately the dance progressed at a deliberately slow pace that resonated most through a visual sensibility.

Terra Firma features Benjamin Heller’s wooden egg sculptures; they are fragile, and the dancers curled inside of them seem fragile as well, like baby birds tentatively readying to hatch. Batten Bland choreographs the dancers’ emergence from the eggs with maternal patience, allowing each new movement— a stretching, a darting through the wooden slats— to morph from one concept to another almost unnoticeably.

When dancer and prop come together in Bland’s work, and they constantly do, she takes advantage of the capacity to create something new. Faces push into suspended cloth, creating a soft imprint of their features. This same cloth can create line. Pulled taut and deftly moved to the outskirts of the stage, the swaths hanging from the ceiling anchor their multi-sailed ship. And there are feathers (such plush, downy feathers!). And there is a floor covered in trash bags, turned into a pitted, roiling sea.

One of the works, A Place of Sun, says Bland’s website, was inspired by the BP oil spill and “investigate(s) entering and exiting space…adaptation and transformation…human and nonhuman nature…during the act of discovery/recovery.” Terra Firma’s trash-bag sea and cloth sails provide a landscape for a piece about immigrating by boat, and the immigrants who took those journeys. The two works were conceptually distinct; in the choreography, immigrating and surviving disaster are both physicalized through dancers’ uplifted chest and chin; aspirations and hope project towards the audience.

The relationship between audience and performer is similarly constructed to be uplifting. At the end of Terra Firma, the egg sculptures are gently handed from dancer to audience. The bobbing rise of these awkward structures as the front row passes them up and over their heads feels transcendent. In this moment of gloriously unprovoked audience participation, the dancers care of the eggs, and our care of the fragile eggs (some of their thin slats have broken and spoke out jaggedly now) all come together. Communally working to end the dance feels like we ascend towards something important together, the ‘something’ being unimportant to specify. It is simply a feeling, like a painting may work to evoke emotion from a passerby. 

Bland’s work would not be out of place in a museum gallery show. The paintings include: a dancer carrying an egg above his head in yellowed silhouette; the bare back of long-limbed Jesse Keller, an alabaster surface amidst a crinkled landscape of oil-black trash-bags. Amongst these strong images, movement serves to transition towards a new and no less stunning pose, making the dance an almost static, visual art. And I wouldn’t mind having that painting on my living room wall.

Mother's Day without flowers but with lots of cheese

A (cheesy) mother's day card for the wonderful Holly, who along with her family, is so generously allowing me to live with her until I find a job in New York.

Winning Poster!

The Final Poster which now serves as the public's view into the Modern Dance Senior Concert "On Your Mark..."

Go to the subsection "Poster Contest" to see the progression of this poster, from first concepts to the final product (which is now ALL AROUND CAMPUS!)

The image has been published in Catalyst Magazine (pg 15)
http://issuu.com/catalystmagazine/docs/catalyst_1203/1

&

The Daily Utah Chronicle

Modern Dance Clothing

Here are a few samples of the articles of clothing that I have created for the University of Utah's department of Modern Dance. 

Senior Concert Vimeo Page

 "On Your Mark..." the Modern Dance Senior Concert, on Vimeo!
http://vimeo.com/moderndanceseniorconcert

I created short videos of most of the seniors' dances, using my classmates rehearsal footage.
These served as a means to publicize the show throughout the rehearsal process.
We created a lot of buzz with these videos by linking them to our facebook page,

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Modern-Dance-Senior-Concert/293726650667001

Postcard // Tanner

My friend Sheila Souder is in love with her dog, Tanner. I took a picture of Tanner and essentially just kept the outline. I really like the Rorschach-esque look of this, and I think that the doubling of the image reflects how self-aware and prissy Tanner is.