2008 Woodie Awards
2007-2008 North Carolina Dance Festival debuts at UNCG
A review
Ali Duffy
Issue date: 10/23/07 Section: Arts & Entertainment
The annual tour of the North Carolina Dance Festival began its three-day run in the UNCG Theatre on Thursday, Oct. 18. Each night featured a different line up of North Carolina dance companies and artists. Friday spotlighted choreographic works by Christina Tsoules Soriano, alban elved dance company, Nelson Reyes, and Talani Torres.
A quartet of women dressed in black pants and zippered tops sustained elegance and somber throughout Christina Tsoules Soriano's "Every Text Has an Intertext." Crawling and twisting torsos punctuated decisive unveiling of words printed on each dancer's body. At first, the audience could only see letters on the bottoms of the dancer's feet, but as more layers of clothing were unzipped or rolled away, entire words were revealed: devotion, method, instinct. A collage of emotions and deliberate movements came together in the end as if an elaborately twisted movie plot.
"Aestuo-Dogma Engine," a work by Karola Luttringhaus, director of alban elved dance company in Wilmington, was a selection of excerpts from a full evening-length work commissioned by the Bricolage Arts Festival 2007. More performance art than dance, the work centered around an inventor and her humanoid creation. Excerpts showed the birth of this alien form and the shared life of it with its creator. Especially memorable moments included the created human learning to walk in boots and the inventor imagining new ideas on a chalkboard that hung from above. Grotesque and dark, Luttringhaus succeeded in establishing intricate characters and innovative ambience.
Following a brief intermission, Nelson Reyes performed his own work titled "Spirit of the Land". Reyes sprung to center stage where a large pile of leaves lay. Predictably, he dove into them and threw them up in the air, a cascade of leaves raining down on him. What followed was nothing short of disaster. Insincere facial expressions and a barrage of emotions seemed to make the audience feel uncomfortable as if they didn't know whether to laugh or cry. A beautiful mover, Reyes has the facility to affect an audience without resorting to choreographic novelties.
The highlight of the evening's works was a piece by Talani Torres titled "Everyone's Olivia." The work was about the many faces each person exhibits. Six dancers, all equally expressive and technically skilled, manipulated chairs so that the chairs became many things: support, shelter, a crutch, safety zone, a habit. Various relationships among dancers as well as internal anxieties were very clear in the movement choices, and the spatial arrangement of the dancers on stage gave the piece a full, narrative quality.
Four extremely different works captured audience imagination on Friday in the UNCG Dance Theatre. Individuality and creativity was key to the success of the evening's selections. North Carolina Dance Festival will also appear in Boone, Raleigh, Charlotte, Wilmington, and Asheville.
To find out more about the North Carolina Dance Festival, visit www.ncdancefestival.org.
A quartet of women dressed in black pants and zippered tops sustained elegance and somber throughout Christina Tsoules Soriano's "Every Text Has an Intertext." Crawling and twisting torsos punctuated decisive unveiling of words printed on each dancer's body. At first, the audience could only see letters on the bottoms of the dancer's feet, but as more layers of clothing were unzipped or rolled away, entire words were revealed: devotion, method, instinct. A collage of emotions and deliberate movements came together in the end as if an elaborately twisted movie plot.
"Aestuo-Dogma Engine," a work by Karola Luttringhaus, director of alban elved dance company in Wilmington, was a selection of excerpts from a full evening-length work commissioned by the Bricolage Arts Festival 2007. More performance art than dance, the work centered around an inventor and her humanoid creation. Excerpts showed the birth of this alien form and the shared life of it with its creator. Especially memorable moments included the created human learning to walk in boots and the inventor imagining new ideas on a chalkboard that hung from above. Grotesque and dark, Luttringhaus succeeded in establishing intricate characters and innovative ambience.
Following a brief intermission, Nelson Reyes performed his own work titled "Spirit of the Land". Reyes sprung to center stage where a large pile of leaves lay. Predictably, he dove into them and threw them up in the air, a cascade of leaves raining down on him. What followed was nothing short of disaster. Insincere facial expressions and a barrage of emotions seemed to make the audience feel uncomfortable as if they didn't know whether to laugh or cry. A beautiful mover, Reyes has the facility to affect an audience without resorting to choreographic novelties.
The highlight of the evening's works was a piece by Talani Torres titled "Everyone's Olivia." The work was about the many faces each person exhibits. Six dancers, all equally expressive and technically skilled, manipulated chairs so that the chairs became many things: support, shelter, a crutch, safety zone, a habit. Various relationships among dancers as well as internal anxieties were very clear in the movement choices, and the spatial arrangement of the dancers on stage gave the piece a full, narrative quality.
Four extremely different works captured audience imagination on Friday in the UNCG Dance Theatre. Individuality and creativity was key to the success of the evening's selections. North Carolina Dance Festival will also appear in Boone, Raleigh, Charlotte, Wilmington, and Asheville.
To find out more about the North Carolina Dance Festival, visit www.ncdancefestival.org.
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