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| Photo by Yi-Chun Wu | Eric Hoisington, with Malcolm Low in background, in SSOOT III
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More from the Inexorable Wave
White Wave's Wave Rising Series
By QUINN BATSON
Offoffoff.com
The Wave Rising series at White Wave has much of the smorgasbord feel of the DUMBO dance festival and Cool NY series but often incorporates companies from outside New York city and the United States. This year's series presented six programs over three weekends, and this review picks groups out of three of those programs.
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| | | WAVE RISING 2009 | | | SCHEDULE | White Wave John Ryan Theater
October 21-November 8, 2009
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Julian Barnett continues to evolve his piece Echologue, playing with movement patterns to explore possible ways to break out of the isolation we inevitably begin from on our journeys to identity, others and meaning. This excerpt has an increasing urgency that builds in fits and starts until returning to Barnett in front of his backstage mirrors, contemplating himself more calmly, seemingly having worked through some of the angst of living to get to a better place.
Young Soon Kim does well when she uses movement and choreographic input from her dancers and serves as director and editor; the variety and dynamics of the pieces in SSOOT III show this clearly. She also chooses excellent dancers who can choreograph, here using Emily Pope Blackman, Benjamin Degenhardt, Eric Hoisington, Malcolm Low and Yin Yue. An opening duet by Low and Blackman is pretty, soft and clinging, with big lifts, but may be better shorter. The duet that Yue and Degenhardt dance in the midst of a quartet percolates with soft angry violence and hard reconciliations and is full of sweet anticipation and tension. And the more acrobatic group piece that ends SSOOT III is really dynamic and interesting, with plenty of tantalizing loose ends and non sequiturs, and showcases Hoisington.
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| Photo by Yi-Chun Wu | | Won Kim/Coll. Dance Project
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Lauri Stallings takes her group gloATL into explosive ballet places with quirky isolations, here using five gifted women wearing oddly mime-like oversize suits. The smallest and youngest, Nicole Jones, is already holding her own at fourteen years old, and Tony Doctor Jenkins does a great little neck-thrusting creature impersonation to begin the piece before the audience lights go down. Virginia Coleman, Sarah Hillmer and Nicole Johnson complete the cast and work the piece hard and beautiful through music by Part, Beethoven, Bizet, Santiago and La Minor, with elements of flopping, floating, vogue and waltz.
Ella Ben-Aharon and Edo Ceder, as YelleB, dance a soft and beautiful duet for Part A: The Meating, a lovely piece despite the title and a clinical narration of the structure and function of the human heart that dominates much of the beginning of the piece. The gist is that the two are in love enough to function as one heart.
JaeHee Choi choreographs The Silence with a liquid feel, alternately languid and speedily splashing to ground, for WonKim/Coll. Dance Project. It is a beautiful, dark, haunting piece.
Malcolm Low also likes the dark. Luscious Colors of an Unclear Canvas has plenty of rich movement in low light and gives Troy Ogilvie plenty of chances to throw off sparks as she rides aloft or comes to ground.
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NOVEMBER 11, 2009
OFFOFFOFF.COM • THE GUIDE TO ALTERNATIVE NEW YORK
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