On the page, we invite dance enthusiasts, fans, and students to submit reviews of CT Dance Performances. We hope you will use this in a respectful and professional manner. We reserve the right to edit and oversee these posts.
On the page, we invite dance enthusiasts, fans, and students to submit reviews of CT Dance Performances. We hope you will use this in a respectful and professional manner. We reserve the right to edit and oversee these posts.
Spectrum in Motion
“Magandang Dalaga: A Beautiful Woman…the Story of Eurydice”
at Charter Oak Cultural Center, Hartford
June 6, 2008
Spectrum in Motion celebrated its 25th anniversary May 29-31 & June 5-7 with a full-evening narrative dance loosely based on the tragic tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. Choreography by artistic director Olivia Ilano-Davis featured her professional company members joined by youth dancers from the Stretching for Life Performance Ensemble and members of second company Spectrum Too! Evening-length dances are the exception – not the rule—in concerts of modern dance. The difficulty is to sustain interest and momentum. Ilano-Davis’s “Magandang Dalaga: A Beautiful Woman…the Story of Eurydice” succeeds in both respects with an episodic structure that shifts through a wide array of moods and tones to tell the story of love and loss (complete with a trip to Hades) as only the Greeks could have imagined it.
Although the narrative provides the framework, Ilano-Davis’s choreography is really all about the dancing. “Magandang Dalaga” is a showcase vehicle for her dancers, professional and apprentice alike. The overall style is balletic: lyrical but with broad gestures that cut through space to give her vocabulary dramatic edge. Above all, it’s the training one notices. Youth dancers and experienced members clearly share a dedication to the discipline of their craft: lines are forceful and clear, feet well-placed, ensemble focus consistently maintained. These are dancers that take their responsibilities as performers seriously and its impossible not to respond in kind. Ilano-Davis deftly arranges the choreography so that all of her dancers are shown to best advantage; out of a cast of some twenty-two dancers, there was not a moment when a dancer looked out of his/her depth technically or emotionally. The men’s ensemble is particularly strong and Ilano-Davis’s son R. Masseo sets the bar with the clarity of his attack, ease of jump, and performance poise.
By evening’s end, I felt a strong connection with this family of dancers and couldn’t help but wonder: where will this one be in five year’s time? How will this one develop in range? What new performance challenges will that one aspire to? Fortunately, Spectrum in Motion (along with its educational outreach programs) has made its home at the Charter Oak Cultural Center so there will be ample opportunity to check in on this impressive group of dancers. To keep a dance company alive for 25 years is something of a small miracle. It takes both inspiration and perseverance; clearly, Ilano-Davis has ample supplies of both –and Hartford dance benefits greatly by her presence.
Katharine Power
A wonderful review of what has been for some time a promising young company (even though the company just celebrated a milestone anniversary) that continues to delight.
Olivia reached a bit more than usual in this one (partly due to a welcome return of strength in her core company), using the wide-ranging and complex musical repertoire of improvising composer Wayne Shorter, singluar in sound and sensibility but firmly rooted in living tradition. Let’s pay attention here to the choreographer revealing a source point of creative inspiration. The music was not just there as accompaniment, but as partner to the dance. Not always the case and a relationship that all of us dance-loving musicians strive to develop.
While we all greatly value a partnership that affords space for rehearsal and performance for a cash-strapped company, one wants, and ultimately, requires, one’s own space. Something about self reliance as an essential step in one’s evolution that ensures, not without risk, the consistency of organizational intent and gesture. Spectrum is now incorporated in Connecticut and will soon be approved as a 501-c3. Partnership remains an essential aspect of our work going ahead, but relationships will possess a greater quantity of balance as Spectrum grows it’s resources and clearly charts it’s path going ahead.
God bless the child who’s got his own.
Here is a great article by Chris Arnott In the New Haven Advocate
Re: New Haven’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas 2008, 613 Radical Acts of Prayer,
Monday, June 30, 2008
Last Dance: The Arts & Ideas finale
posted by Christopher Arnott
I’m still reeling from all that reeling and wheeling and cavorting and contorting and silent sacred shorthanding and gestural longing on the Green Saturday night, orchestrated by Maryland’s Liz Lerman Dance Exchange with extraordinary Elm City support. It’s only fitting that for the most faith- and nature-based event of Arts & Ideas 2008, 613 Radical Acts of Prayer, the overcast sky and impending rains were divinely restrained until the multi-part performance had extended its last leg.
Saturday’s performance was only a couple of hours long, but had begun months earlier with workshops, filming, community outreach and extensive rehearsals of a world premiere tightly tuned to the spiritual needs and rhythms of New Haven. Numerous small performances and interactions had already been held.
If some of the elements on the Green seemed last-minute or slapdash, it’s due to the shifting numbers and expectations of the vast audience, which turned out to be bigger than the turn-out for much more familiar and conventional acts (in better weather, even) during this year’s festival. Let’s not minimize that achievement—it’s proof that the concept and principles of Arts & Ideas are sounder than many imagine—that you can rouse a community and draw a diverse crowd without involving a major name, or even a major arts genre. The festival united thousands of people on the Green with an untested modern dance piece, for Christ’s sake! And aspects of it literally were for Christ’s sake, held in Center Church and United Church on the Green. (Not everyone in attendance agreed with the artistic impulse; a couple of members of the thousands-strong Church on the Rock protested with evangelical fury outside United Church, wearing T-shirts that read “I only dance for Jesus”). Ethnic folk dancing filled the outdoor path between the two churches.
The audience matched the performance’s elements for sheer wide-ranginess. Children who could barely walk were dancing along, as were seniors and those in wheelchairs. One of the key parts of the Green gathering was a spin around the fountain featuring current and former members of CT Roller Girls (Gasp! You mean Ideat Village doesn’t have a lock on the tattooed skater crowd? Sacrilege!.
Folks at the front of the stage for the culminating concert of repertory pieces by the Liz Lerman troupe shouted “You go, girl” and “That’s beautiful” to one of the middle-aged dancers in the proudly demographically diverse ensemble. Whereas a metal-band audience might hold up lighters and a pop crowd might engage in a sing-along, this audience gamely learned an extensive arm-stretching and body-swaying dance routine. Thousands performed in unison.
The earlier elements were no less shabby, or any less accessible. Film images were projected on the ceiling of Center Church, where viewers (in numbers not seen at that church in a month of Sundays) were encouraged to lie down in the pews to best view them. The film was of the Liz Lerman dancers running abruptly around New Haven’s Union Station. During and after the screening, dancers both Lerman and local took to the balconies and pews, clad in white, pointing ominously heavenward.
The simplicity of the piece cut both ways. Its content was barely worthy of deep analysis. But as a sustained physical and visceral image of faith and community, 613 Radical Acts of Prayer transcended all mortal expectations, and lifted the Arts & Ideas festival to a new level of creative surprise, progressive arts management, social influence and community involvement. Lords of the dance indeed.
What a great weekend (10/24,25,26) for Hartford’s Dance community! Friday and Saturday, the 5×5 Festival at Saint Joseph College with fifteen different groups performing(collegiate on Friday, professional on Saturday), Saturday and Sunday, CT Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet at the Bushnell, and CT Companies, Spectrum in Motion and Adam Miller Dance Project on tour at the Provincetown Dance Festival.
I attended the Friday night 5×5 Collegiate showcase at Saint Joseph and it was full of youthful enthusiasm and with a large and lively crowd. Colleges represented were Saint Joseph College, Naugatuck Valley Community College, Eastern CT State University and Central CT State University, Trinity College and Hartford Conservatory -a great variety of work on show from enthusiastic and touching novice dancers to the sophistication and clarity of Trinity College’s Axe Dance and guest performers, Ballet Theatre Company of West Hartford. Congratulations to Robert Smith and Susan Murphy of St. Jo’s for sustaining this festival for six years – here’s to year seven.
Romeo and Juliet, under the Artistic Direction of Brett Raphael, was a coup of quite another kind. Wonderful to see a full-scale ballet company performing to the marvelous Prokofiev score. Really an incredible accomplishment for Brett Raphael to assemble a company to pull this off with style and bravura. The company surely deserved a larger audience (certainly at the Sunday matinee which I attended).
The first act was terrific with Cecilia Kerche convincing as the shy and innocent Juliet meeting Romeo for the first time, with exciting ensemble dancing from everyone. The men playing the key parts of Romeo, Benvolio and Tybalt were energetic, stylish and sword-fighting with exhuberance.
If I could be a fairy godmother for CT Ballet, I would rustle up Hartford Symphony to play in the orchestra pit at the Bushnell’s Belding Theater and the Palace Theatre, Waterbury, and give the ballet (and Prokofiev’s score) the emotional weight and dramatic intensity it deserves.
Dance lovers of all kinds, don’t miss this production when it comes to the Stamford.
PALACE THEATRE
Stamford Center for the Arts
61 Atlantic Street, Stamford
Saturday, November 1, 2008 – 7:30pm
Sunday, November 2, 2008 – 2:00pm