Daniel Dvorin: Five Step Deluxe: The Sheer Joy of Dance

§ October 5th, 2008 § Filed under Assignments, Capsule Reviews, Fall for Dance

Daniel Dvorin
IDC

Fall For Dance Review: September 25, 2008
“Five Step Deluxe: The Sheer Joy of Dance”

Modern dance incorporated with ballet is a bizarre but interesting mix of dance styles, resulting in a fascinating production. The goal of the Fall for Dance festival is to introduce dance to new audiences. However, the audience that is present ranges from students viewing a dance production for the first time to expert dancers and choreographers. The show consists of five dances, each very different from each other.
The first performance, Pithoprakta, was a completely eccentric dance whose music, choreography, and visual effects had no association. The backdrop consisted of a black and white coordinate plane with ink smudges spanning from left to right. Instead of a beautiful composition, the music was similar to spunk rock, music made with household items instead of instruments. The choreography included seven women and five men dressed in black, rolling around the floor as auxiliary dancers. The lead dancers, Elisabeth Holowchuk and Matthew Prescott, dressed in white, were creative and expressive in the style they danced.
The dance following, an excerpt from Love, was a solo performance by Talia Paz. Although each dance is very different from the one prior, directly comparing this to Pithoprakta; the music was more fitting to the dance, and there was more emotion and love in her recital.
The Lombard Twins are back with the amazing world premiere, Lombard Play Piazzolla – The Dance Concert. Instead of a generic visual backdrop, the two brothers had a live orchestra on stage, which they used as the layout of their canvas. The passion that these brothers put into their dance is evident in the sync of their dance as well as their reaction to a huge crowd in City Center applauding them insanely. This dance, inspired by street dance and hip-hop, was a wonderful fusion of Piazzolla’s compositions and the Lomard Twins’ ability to turn music into visual art.
The Kate Weare Company was an entertaining production with very peculiar structure. It started with a solo by Leslie Kraus and then transitioned into a duet by Douglas Gillespie and Kate Weare. The solo and the duet had no connection. One thing I really like was the incorporation of lighting effects. In the solo, the light was in forms of boxes following Kraus as she progressed from the background to the foreground of the stage. When the duet was on stage, the lighting switched to fit the music and theme of their dance.
The finale was an extensive Afro-Caribbean dance choreographed by Garth Fagan. The elements of modern ideas and traditional culture were merged as the 12 dancers flowed through the stage. At one point, all the dancers splashed onto the stage in an array of colors. The dancers’ costumes differed by an assortment of colors. The colors mixed with the magnitude of dancers gave off a very impressionable memory.
Fall for Dance is a dance festival that has been going on annually from 2004. City Center’s successful festival is priced at $10 a ticket for all seats. This year, Fall for Dance continues through September 27, 2008 at City Center.