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Dance Review: 'Celebrate Dance'

Wiebke Schuster |
March 13, 2014 | 12:27 p.m. PDT

Contributing Writer

"EXHIBIT a" Ate9dANCEcOMPANY / Photo by Tim Agler
"EXHIBIT a" Ate9dANCEcOMPANY / Photo by Tim Agler

Saturday night’s "Celebrate Dance" festival at the historic Alex Theatre in Glendale was perhaps not the most well calibrated night of dance, but in the end the audience seemed to greatly enjoy the cross-section of Los Angeles’ dance scene. The evening featured a variety of contemporary dance companies with a tap crew of BPM beatsperminute closing the night on a high note.

For the ninth year in a row, executive producer Jamie Nichols presented "Celebrate Dance," a mixed-bill evening featuring eight different dance troupes, most based in the greater Los Angeles area.

San Francisco based Levy Dance performed "Holding Pattern," a work from 2004. Though technically adept, the trio seemed too immersed in their own worlds, confined in space by seven hanging light bulbs. Impulse, followed by impact, followed by reaction of the partner quickly became the norm in this piece, making the choreographic structure predictable.

Lollie Works’ artistic director Lindsey Lollie danced in her own work, entitled "Interval." The original score, by Paul Nabil Matthis, consists of recorded voices, opening with the sentence “An LSD trip can last up to eight hours. The aftermath, I find can last much longer.” The dancers ran in an entwined circle before closing in on themselves, metaphorically capturing both the exhilaration and the internal collapse of substance abuse.

Danielle Agami’s Ate9dANCEcOMPANY presented a Los Angeles premiere with "EXHIBIT a," an exacting percussive exploration of form and gesture. This piece stuck out due to the meticulous execution of the dancers. Their grasp of timing and varying movement dynamics became clear both in unison phrases and solos. In one section, the dancers seemed to race each other.  One dancer crossed the stage in backwards rolls, another inched her way across the stage on her shoulder blades.

BPM beatsperminute was by far the energetic high point of the evening, with tap dancers Brooke Paulsen-Zelus, Christopher Lee Rutledge and Glyn Gray giving a superbly dazzling performance. It was, in a word, exhilarating. The live band and singer ended what seemed to be an evening of serious contemporary dance with a club atmosphere.

Overall, the two-hour plus evening was reminiscent of a recital or showcase, though much of the dancing was technically at a very high level. If this was supposed to indicate a microcosm of Los Angeles dance, one might think the scene is dominated by concert contemporary with the occasional fun tap number. This is in fact, would leave much of Los Angeles’ dance scene yet to be celebrated.

For more theater and dance coverage, click here.

Reach contributing writer Wiebke Schuster here or follow her on Twitter here

Read more about dance by Wiebke on The Ballet Bag or Stance on Dance.



 

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