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Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Moving People Displays Fresh Moves, Emotional Heat
By Jennifer Noyer
For the Journal
Friday evening offered the second opportunity this reviewer has had to see Santa Fe's Moving People Dance Company in Albuquerque. This year it celebrated its fifth annual Santa Fe Dance Festival, expanding its approach to audiences at the KiMo Theatre.
The program continued to reveal a fresh, unique vocabulary and searing emotional intensity in the six pieces presented by choreographers Joan Lombardi, Echo Gustafson, Curtis Uhlemann, Sean Dahlberg and Ronn Stewart.
The dance vocabulary is an elemental compound of modern and jazz styles that has bubbled up into something quite new. Uhlemann's “Glass Walls,” to Phillip Glass's Violin Concerto No. 2, worked around four metallic sculptures, created by sculptor/welder Mike Garcia, designed to be used as chairs. Two couples moved toward and away from each other, rising from each sculpture in breathy phrases. A phrase would be broken by minute gasps of stillness before moving on to the next moment in time as each fluid meeting and parting simmered with mounting emotional heat. Dancers Dahlberg, Tony Suhadolnik, Erica Gionfriddo and Ariel Johnson were superb.
Gionfriddo performed Lombardi's dark and gravity-dominated “Abyss” to music by Jennifer Higdon and a sound collage. The background projection of what seemed like minute paramecia on a slide suggested a powerful physical destiny. All Gionfriddo's movements seemed to sprout from an internal struggle which had a physical grasp on the viewer's response as well.
“Sofra” was Gustafson's take on three relationships, designed in three sections. The three couples on stage moved in succession through tightly controlled sculptings, each dancer maintaining physical contact with a partner. The movement progressed toward synchrony with patterns of touching, pulling, balancing and lifting.
The second section was a stunning solo by Phylicia Roybal, filled with intensity in a dance of meditation to plaintive Spanish songs. Section three brought the three couples back in a symbolic narrative of death and a kind of transfiguration, each dancer carrying a single flower and rising from the floor to lift one dancer above at center stage as the lights faded.
Dahlberg's “You Can't Sit Wit Us,” to music by Devothcka and Yann Tiersanna, demonstrated more aspects of the company's new dance vocabulary.
Two dancers, male and female, moved in the strong, muscular style of the jazz idiom, when nine dancers entered in a slick, hippy grouping, then froze, flicking only their hands at the solo woman as though shunning and ushering her away. Dahlberg continues to blend in a more modern, contemporary style here with hand gestures such as clasping the chest, or vibrating the fingers to suggest suppressed anger.
Gustafson dedicated “Benediction” to her mother and father in a close, very intimate duet with an almost ceremonial mood to the Portuguese “Canca De Embalar: José Embala O Menino” by Montserrat Figueras. Slow backward leans and lunges became a repeated motif in the duet, the dancers sometimes sliding under each other's extended hand and arm to touch more closely.
Gionfriddo and Uhlemann created a gentle chemistry between them that was visually compelling and emotionally true.
“Flying by the Seat…(of our dance),” choreographed by Stewart and the dancers, brought the concert to a close with the seemingly wild abandon of jazzy, hip-hop street dance in six sections, to a soundtrack designed by DJ Sablazo. Here the more stately modern vocabulary fused violent, percussive movement with a high-energy expressive quality that was almost convulsive.
Phylicia Roybal exploded with acrobatic energy in her solo sections, while David Johnson and Spencer Toll twisted their bodies in fast gyrations, full of exciting macho vitality in the fourth, “Simmer Down” section.
This was a dynamic and thoughtful performance by a fine, gifted and professional dance company. I hope they will visit more often.
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