Balance Arts Center
June 6, 2024
Artistic Director: Kristen Klein
Choreographers: Hadar Landon, Rachel Daley (32nd Pack Dance Company), Kristen Klein (Inclined Dance Project), Angie Moon Conte, Donterro Culp (Culpdid Dance), Madeline Nobida and Bella Stenvall
Dancers: Claire Louise Goldes, Maya Lam, Caroline Sheehan, Mackenzie Simons, Lindsey Swyers, Madison Hilligoss, Rachel Daly, Kelly Guerrero, Natalie Katz, Alyssa Sartuche, Caroline Sherwood, Gioia von Staden, Amy Campbell, Maria Gardner, Shannon McGee, Angie Moon Conte, Olivia Chesneau, Noëlle Davé, Allegra Persico, Isabele Rosso, & Mackenzie Simons, Madeline Nobida & Bella Stenvall
Concert dance is most often presented proscenium style with audiences facing a stage that is several feet removed from the first row of chairs. However, Kristen Klein, Artistic Director of Inclined Dance Project, chooses a more intimate setting for her first production of inROUND. With the audience seated in a circle around the performance space at Balance Arts Center, six choreographers offer rare vantage points into works that have either been adapted or created specifically for this non-traditional space.
Hadar Landon’s Swimming Sonata is a unique treat. From its opening, Landon utilizes dynamic contrast to establish a rhythm we cannot hear but can see in spines that cascade and undulate, arms that ripple and suspend. Punctuated with syncopated steps and crisp snapping fingers, five dancers move with grounded flow. Rather than merely watching dance, Landon allows audiences to hear movement and feel sound by combining tap dance and contemporary styles. As the performers add body percussion to the choreography- stomps, claps, slaps against their chests- their rhythmic structure becomes discernible. When tap dancer Madison Hilligoss enters and builds louder, more forceful patterns, Swimming Sonata evolves into a movement conversation between the dancers. Her short series of steps initiate falls and turns, and as her tapping patterns become more complex, so do the contemporary movement phrases. The dancers suspend through Hilligoss’s silences, accenting her flaps and brushes, and together create a sonic environment that is both auditory and visual, and uniquely captivating.
The most alluring aspect of watching dance in the round is the chance to see movement from unconventional angles. Each seat in the small theater provides audience members a slightly different perspective, perhaps only a few inches from the next person, but those inches have profound effects. 32nd Pack Dance Company’s The Healing Line and Culpdid Dance’s Without Remembrance illustrate this singularity well. Choreographer Rachel Daly uses the space purposefully in The Healing Line, assigning no one area as “front” and creating a dimensionality that is unavailable in proscenium theaters. As one dancer performers a series of arms movements facing one side of the circle, viewers witness her gestural specificity and facial expressions. Audience members across the circle see only how those same movements oscillate across her back and hips, unaware of what her hands and face are communicating. In a group lift, some viewers are able to see the hand positions of the dancers doing the lifting, others see only the dancer leaving the ground. In this way, Daly invites audiences into her story of familial support in a highly personal way.
Donterreo Culp establishes volume in much the same way. Without the frontal perspective of a proscenium set-up, Culpdid Dance’s excerpt of Without Remembrance elicits feelings of affinity between performers and audience. The five dancers take turns separating from the group, sitting around the circumference of the circle watching one another. Bearing witness and making space for someone else’s voice amplifies feelings of rapport and reverence. While the score transitions between ambient and driving sounds, the shift between tracks feels abrupt. However, the choreography does not always mimic the sound, and the contrast between sustained and percussive phrasing prevents the piece from becoming hypnotic. Culp’s choreography fluctuates between serene and animalistic, the dancers sometimes moving in tribal unison, at others in meditative equipoise.
Klein’s Fog also employs dancers observing one another, both in stillness and while moving. The piece opens with performer Shannon McGee taking a seat in the audience, watching with us as Maria Gardner sits alone on stage and gives herself a high-five. Gardner begins to walk the perimeter and McGee emerges from the shadows, ghost-like, to accompany her. When dancer Amy Campbell joins their trance-like walk, her steps have more purpose, seeking to interrupt. Together, their unison movements are gestural and precise with surprising accents and moments of suspension- hallmarks of Klein’s gripping choreography. Her use of counterpoint in the round setting is equally compelling. When Campbell is stationary, Gardner and McGee perform space-devouring phrases that circle around her, dissecting the stage at varying angles, highlighting its depth. Dark, ominous lighting heightens impressions of density and a womb-like enclosure. As the trio explores their environment, sometimes with tranquility and others with desperation, Campbell’s character acts as chaperone and guide, continually adjusting and readjusting Gardner and McGee, pushing and pulling them into a state of calm presence.
Performed on a square of carpet, with a mirror-tile decorated Roomba whirring across the stage, Angie Conte’s Island conjures memories of Covid-19 and the isolation of lock down. Conte pushes the carpet with her head, wraps herself in it like a cocoon, and lies on her back, stretching languidly across it. Her movements- lunging, reaching, hinging- are full-bodied yet take up only the immediate space around her. In contrast, her disco-robot partner traverses the stage freely, bumping into the shoes of spectators who sometimes untangle it from chair legs or change its course with a gentle nudge. While Conte’s intent is clear, the intimacy of the stage setting gives Island its power. Hemmed in on all sides by bodies, Conte’s “living room” island becomes even more confining.
eMBody’s I Wanna Know You, choreographed and performed by Madeline Nobida and Bella Stenvall invokes feelings of community and freedom. Nobida and Stenvall circumvolve back-to-back for nearly two-minutes, searching the dimly lit stage for the presence of another. When they find themselves shoulder to shoulder, a look of recognition softens their bodies into an aqueous duet. Movements wave across their chests and arms as they ebb toward each other and flow away. Whether held or oozing, in unison or opposition, their movements are circular like the space around them, symbolizing unity and a relationship without beginning or end. Both Nobida and Stenvall dance with an accented flow that is hypnotic, and as they take turns watching one another, audiences are once again reminded of the power in bearing witness as a form of acceptance. After a bouncy, house-party groove, the pair end up back-to-back again, sinking in gleeful exhaustion to the floor. But the communion they have found is not quite complete. With inviting smiles, Nobida and Stenvall guide audience members into their circle and a dance-party arises. Strangers smile, shake, giggle, wave their arms and move for the sheer joy of it, finding harmony within their individuality and bringing inROUND, quite literally, full circle.
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