Carla & Company
Dance Place
December 4, 2010
Eureka Dance Festival
Dance Place
December 12, 2010
Washington, D.C.
By Lisa Traiger
Copyright 2010 by Lisa Traiger
Over consecutive weekends at Dance Place this month a long-time fixture in the Washington, D.C., dance community said goodbye while a plucky dance collaborative introduced six brand-new works. Carla Perlo, cofounder of Dance Place and the driving force behind Carla & Company, has long been committed to building audiences for contemporary and world dance in Washington, D.C. The diverse performers in her troupe work intensively with inreach and outreach programs –- bringing D.C. students to the Northeast Washington studio/theater and performing in local cafeterias, school gyms and auditoriums. Fledgling Eureka Dance Festival, the brainchild of Kate Jordan and Orit Sherman, made headway on the D.C. area dance circuit by providing a platform for emerging artists and dancers to collaborate and present new works. In using the festival format, Jordan and Sherman offer opportunities to dancemakers who don’t yet have a deep enough body of work to present a full evening of choreography. It’s also a wise move in marketing a concert: the more performers and choreographers in the show, the more friends buy tickets and spread the word.
While Perlo plans to step away from choreographing and directing her troupe at the end of this season (the group will be renamed Dance Place Moving Company with new directors), she will remain at the helm of Dance Place, long the home and soul of contemporary and world dance in this region. Perlo’s choreography has never broken new ground, but it shows well her range of dancers, including youthful twentysomethings and a grandmother. “Nothing Stays the Same” pays tribute both to the former Brookland Studios, next door to Dance Place, where classes and rehearsals frequently took place, and to life changes as people and places grow, evolve and move forward. The studios were torn down earlier this year to make room for the new Brookland Lofts, which will include artist housing, a dance studio and classrooms for Dance Place programs. Filmmaker Robin Lyttle shot video reminiscences for the five-section work that favors Perlo’s rangy, traveling locomotor sequences and some slightly Cunninghamesque permutations as dancers’ arms, legs and torsos maneuver in swift motion. A memory piece, “Songs From My Youth -– Dances for Daddy,” shows best the pleasantly open faces of the dancers as they pair up and work together. Danced to “Hit Parade” classics by the likes of Maurice Chevalier, Johnny Mathis and Frank Sinatra, the piece pays tribute to Perlo’s father, Hyman Perlo, lending a warm and fuzzy cast, even if the dancing provides nowhere near the gutsy Tharpisms of “Sinatra Suite” or “Come Fly Away.” After an experiential segment for a passel of cute kids in the audience, the evening, narrated graciously by Perlo, closed with an invitation for all to come up on stage and join the dance.
***
“D.C.’s newest generation of artists” proclaims the Eureka Dance Festival credo. With six new works (one, graduate student Nathan Andary’s “Use-and-Toss,” was postponed due to dancer injury) by as many choreographers, untapped possibilities surely should burble forth.
Among those with prospects: newcomer Jose Ruiz-Subauste, a Peru-based choreographer and dancer, fashioned a small gem, “Ashes2Ashes,” for five women using the keen eye of video artist Mariana Moran. With suspenseful Hitchcockian flair, the five women are first glimpsed in a clump, then each, costumed in a basic black shifts, breaks away to parse out her personal movement motif. The dance space, confined by a taped off border and shadowy lighting by Stefan Johnson, features two windows and a tile floor projected on the back wall. “Ashes2Ashes” feels like a macabre Shirley Jackson-esque back story: The dancers accompany themselves on video as ghostly images parry with their fulsome, embodied selves. Mixed in with the larger-scale cavorting of the dancers, their neurotic twitches, splayed finand gers, silently mouthed words suggest entrapment -- in a sanitarium or purgatory or merely a room haunted with memories? It’s hard to say, but this piece left one wanting more.
D.C.-based Kate Jordan’s well-calibrated trio, “Charged Intuition,” features strong performances by Ronya-Lee Anderson, Catherine Lui and Hannah Rolfes, and the atmospheric, vaguely ethnic music of Christos Hatzis. Fine motor movements –- a finger twitch or a ball of the foot double digging into the floor –- contrast with larger scale slices of arms and legs and shapely curvilinear lines. Drawn together, later the trio finds capitulation in the work’s final moments.
The program also included choreographer/dancers Keira Hart-Mendoza and Carrie Monger riffing on the “Housewives” reality television phenomenon. Athletic Pirjo Garby joins Monger and Hart-Mendoza as a trio social-climbing women. More interesting than the slight choreography, the premise, or the rough-cut video, the music included multiple renditions of the “Habanera” from Bizet’s “Carmen” by musicians working in differing genres. It proved nearly impossible to detect the scientific grounding in Orit Sherman’s ambitious but inscrutable “Within a Cell.” Inspired by research in cell biology, the piece puts five dancers on steel rocker contraptions over their sequined sneakers, sending them off-kilter, teetering and bobbing as they attempt to maneuver through arabesques and simple walks. Perhaps this struggle for stability against impossible odds represents the volatile nature of cell division or mutation. In “shapeless matter of the ordered universe,” Roxie Doniphan Thomas offers another dark study that starts with eye-catching stylized clock-work phrasing but ends in a clichéd bout of running, clasping and reaching. A rumination on D.C. neighborhoods, Glade Dance Collective’s eight women meandered through “District. Defined?” with little notable in this mundane day-in-the-life piece.
Top: Carla & Company by Tony Powell, courtesy Dance Place
Published December 13, 2010
© 2010 Lisa Traiger
Comments