DanceWorks - UMD Theatre

DanceWorks at UMD Offers “Fresh-From-the-Oven Dances”

Lawrance Bernabo

Duluth News Tribune

October  22, 2015 

 DanceWorks, which opened on UMD’s mainstage theater on Thursday night, is as enjoyable an evening of dance as you could hope to find.

As Artist Director Rebecca Katz Harwood told us before the show, these were really new, “fresh-from-the-oven dances,” reflecting the work of choreographers and dancers not only from the University of Minnesota Duluth, but outside the university as well.

Two student choreographers created strikingly dramatic pieces. Sarah Hinz’s “Missing You,” set to Sam Smith’s “Lay Me Down,” had Rebekah Meyer dancing over a white dress shirt laid on the stage, her long hair, undone, accenting her spins and dives. In time she was joined by Reese Britts for a bit of ballroom dancing that set up a nice little narrative twist.

The standout piece of the evening, “Escaping the Pigeon Hole,” choreographed by Cassie Liberkowski to Hoziers’ “To Be Alone,” offered a love triangle noir that begins with two masked figures circling a young man. The contrasts between the shifting pairs of dancers versus the odd dancer out (L.J. Klassen, Michael Hassenmueller and Kevin Dustrude), were fascinating, and there were sections exceptionally well-choreographed to the music.

Katz Harwood choreographed two pieces in collaboration with her dancers. “Tranquility” focused primarily on the horizontal, the dancers rolling around on the floor in progressive waves of languid movement to Zoë Keating’s “Sun Will Set.” It was interesting to see how long it was before any of them broke contact with the stage floor.

In comic contrast, “Freedom” offered joyous anarchy, with everybody doing their own thing, appropriately to the Rebirth Brass Band’s “Do Whatcha Wanna.” I admit, I was somewhat disappointed when dancers started doing the same thing, but this delightful piece had an awful lot of laughs.

The pure joy of dance was abundantly evident in the performances by the other two UMD dance groups, both of which had dancers who joined the theater students for other pieces.

The African Dancers evinced the joys of synchronicity, where everybody learns the same dance as a defining aspect of their culture. This is something we lack: Once a generation everybody knows how to hand jive or do the Macarena, but choreographed hand movements and pivoting to the right are not really dancing.

The other two student-choreographed pieces, “Spectrum” by Mai Che Lee with its attitude dancing, and “Memo” by Kelly James, which had a nice sequence reminiscent of depictions of the Three Graces, were largely in this spirit of dancing in unison.

Funk Soul Patrol, the other UMD dance group, did a trio of hip-hop songs, and went from lip-synching while they danced to all six of the dancers getting solo turns while the audience clapped along to “Jump Around” by House of Pain.

“Mobile (2),” choreographed by LilaAnn Coates White, explored the possibilities for two male dancers posing Talia Beech-Brown. This was a slow piece, both graceful and powerful.

The other hip-hop piece, “XO” choreographed by Jack Samuel Gill, had a couple of brief sections that concluded just as they were really getting interesting, so I would have liked to have seen more.

The finale was provided by six dancers from the Twin Cities’ Stuart Pimsler Dance & Theater company. “Tales from the Book of Longing,” originally commissioned and presented by the Guthrie Theater, was the most sophisticated piece of the evening with several striking sections emphasizing tension in movement.

A pair of dueling dyads offered the contrasts of molten steel versus melted quicksilver, although it was hard to choose who to watch. Then two male dancers maintained a slow, combative embrace, before the piece concluded with the three female dancers being arbitrarily rearranged on stage by their male counterparts.

The program changes a bit over the course of the performances. The African dancers only appear on opening night, while on Saturday and Sunday special guest artist Rosy Simas performs her acclaimed work “We Wait in the Darkness.”

Tribes - UMD Stage 2

Spoon River - UMD Theatre

Dead Men Do Tell Tales

Sheryl Jensen

Duluth News Tribune

October  1, 2015 

 

A play adaptation based on a 100-year-old poetry collection of 244 epitaphs shouldn’t be quite so much fun. Yet, the opening night audience members for Spoon River Anthology at the University of Minnesota Duluth clearly were finding not only moments to ponder life’s eternal mysteries but also opportunities to laugh and to clap along with the music.
Contrary to the old saying, dead men (and women) indeed do tell tales in director Tom Isbell’s adaptation of Edgar Lee Masters’ 1915 poetry collection Spoon River Anthology. The crisp, 90-minute production (performed without an intermission) flies by with its mix of comedy, pathos, music and dance.

In stories of murder, lust, greed, jealousy, pride, and any number of other human vices, Masters’ voices from the grave tells the provocative secrets and revelations and the mostly unfulfilled hopes and dreams of those “sleeping on the hill” in the town cemetery of the mythical town of Spoon River.

Isbell’s research from his pilgrimage this past summer to Masters’ home turf in Lewistown and Petersburg, Ill., is on glorious display, not only in his selection of which poems to choose and how to arrange them in ever fascinating configurations but also in the projections, with the beautiful, the ugly and the comic in images of American life gone by.

Scenic designer Jenna Mady’s elegant set includes a simple rake of wooden planks, nine mismatched chairs, a small bandstand, a few stacked boxes and frames for the projections. Wesley Darton’s lighting design is appropriately atmospheric without being dark or oppressive. Heather Olson’s costumes are evocative of the period, with simple but effective changes made in progress by adding aprons, shawls, hats and coats.

The ensemble of five men and four women tackle nearly 60 of the poems in earnest direct address to the audience. While the monologues don’t all ring with the same levels of conviction and clarity, each of the cast members has a chance to connect in moments that are brutally honest, delightfully comic and frequently sarcastic.

Because each cast member is called upon to play several characters, it is important for them to distinguish each clearly with style, energy, dialect, projection and expression. Some of the ensemble members succeed at this more universally than others.

The evening’s most effective comic highlights are provided by Brian Saice as a fiddler and a diminutive judge and Phil Hoelscher as the ever-beleaguered husband.  On the tragic side of the ledger, Lauren Schulke resonates with her portrayals of a rape victim, a prostitute and the brutalized town poetess.

While it truly is an ensemble show, Ryan James Fargo brings a special maturity and confidence to his various personas. Fargo’s energy is electric and his understanding of how to take command of the stage and how to set each character apart make him the most compelling to watch.

Music Director Andy Kust (who also worked with Isbell on the adaptation) is the onstage “band,” playing piano and percussion. While the show is not a musical, the use of music in hymns, period songs and underscore helps to evoke mood and to provide another slant on the show’s themes.

The full-company vocals on “Blessed Assurance” and, most particularly, “This Little Light of Mine” are stunning. One of the evening’s other standout musical moments is a lively full-company square dance, choreographed by Rebecca Katz Harwood.

The cast shows an obvious reverence for the poems and the songs throughout, most particularly with the closing hymn, “I Feel Like Traveling On.” The song underscores projections of people in the community who sent in photos of themselves and their loved ones, reminding us all how fleeting such moments are.

The English teacher part of my soul hopes that UMD’s production will spark interest in audience members going back to the original source material, to do their own detective work of how intricately these characters connect in a masterwork that reads like a kaleidoscopic mosaic of the human experience.