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.”