Larry Keigwin makes dances with a lot of substance. His work is often humorous or deep, with few people, or a gang of folks. For this season, he invited guest choreographers Loni Landon and Adam Barruch to make works; a first for the company. Landon made Wait Nearby a dark dance testing the women’s ability to dance in heels while the men accompanied them. Kudos to Naomi Luppescu whose costumes were both elegant and malleable at the same time. Barruch presented Drop on a separate evening. Keigwin’s huge cast of guest artists in Exit Like An Animal, originally made for the dancers of The Julliard School was typical Keigwin—large, complex and multipart, so if you blinked you would miss them darting on and off stage or carving crazy shapes at rapid speeds. Sidewalk (2009) danced by the company (Kacie Boblitt, Brandon Cournay, Benjamin Freedman, Kile Hotchkiss, Gina Ianni, Emily Schoen and Jaclyn Walsh, is classic Keigwin. Here, they are “regular people,” dressed in “regular clothes,” going about their “regular day,” never mind that there is an audience. At sometimes breakneck speed, they bobbed and weaved, clung to or thawed from each other for a good chunk of time off stage: in the aisles, on the stairs, along the front of the stage and in the front row. The gift of the evening was Keigwin’s 3 Ballards, marking a return to the stage for him after 10 years. Three times during the evening’s program, between the other works, he danced Ballard #1, #2 and #3, each filled with a Keigwin smile, gestures and perfectly-timed. Traversing the space differently each time, he shifts from movement to movement with precision and calm, seamlessly leaning into an attitude derriere , or smiles when his arms flapped low to the side as if trying to take flight. The guest artists were: Marcus Bellamy, Zackery Betty, Winston Dynamite Brown, Jourdan Epstein, Candace Jarvis, Blake Krapels, Rashidi Lewis, Amber Barbee Pickens and Taquirah Thompson.
RSS Feed