Phillyist Reviews... DanceBOOM! Illusions of Space

Whoops! We made a calendar boo-boo and we didn't get up the preview for the second week of DanceBOOM! yesterday. So consider this two posts in one—the event information is below!

Week two of DanceBOOM! at the Wilma kicked off on Broad Street in a big way with the N.E. Frankford Boys and Girls Club, American Legion Post 224 Drill Team and Nicetown Stars Dance Team. The Nicetown girls were adorable, and the drill team was really impressive in their precision. (It was lots of fun to watch terrified people try to figure out how to walk past without getting trampled, too.) None of the performers in either group of the pre-show were over eighteen, so it would be unfair of me to give any real criticism to the groups, but I'm certainly glad that I arrived at the Wilma early enough to see them.

Once the audience was settled into their seats, it was time for Bridgman/Packer Dance to take the stage with their piece "Under the Skin." The dancing in this piece was technically impressive, but not terribly special. What was special, however, was the presentation of it. Dancer/choreographers Myrna Packer and Art Bridgman use projection that they designed in collaboration with Jim Monroe and Peter Bobrow to create a fantastic onstage multimedia experience. They appear and disappear behind the curtain, they dance duets with themselves, they become static, they merge into each other. It's full sensory overload, sometimes a bit too much so, but in the end, I was nothing if not blown away by the performance.

Group Motion Dance Company then began the first of its two dances of the evening: Sections I, V, and VII of "Machinas Simples," choreographed by Silvana Cardell. I had previously admired this piece, and very much so, in Group Motion's Live Arts performance, Cell: Movement in Restricted Spaces. It's full of impressive feats of athleticism: dancers perform on a ramp that's tilted at almost forty-five degrees, and then duck under and run from a giant pendulum that looks like it would really hurt if you didn't duck in time when it was coming at you. I really wanted to see someone ride on the pendulum, actually, but in retrospect, that sounds very, very dangerous. And hurting performers is bad. So maybe I'd have just settled for more time with the dangerous metal ball swinging across the stage. (I should note how interesting it was, too, to see this piece on stage, rather than in a multipurpose room in a church, which is where I first saw it staged. Even if you saw Group Motion's PLAF piece, it's worth seeing it again at DanceBOOM!, just to see what it looks like in a real theatre with real lights and safer rigging.)

Unfortunately, I found Group Motion's second piece, and the final piece of the evening, choreographer Akiko Kitamura's "Rondo," to be far less impressive. In fact, I was generally underwhelmed by it. It's not that the dancing wasn't good, because it was. But the piece didn't speak to me the way that "Machinas Simples" did. Part of it was my general annoyance with the opening soundtrack: the very familiar sounds of longhand writing and paper being wadded up and thrown away. It would have been fine, except that it didn't match the events onstage, so I just found it distracting. Add to that the multiple projections going on at once: while the first piece of the evening had been overwhelming because of its projections, the action onstage was at least concentrated in one location. In "Rondo," everything was too spread apart, and sitting, as I was, in the sixth row of the house, I found that I couldn't get a full picture of the stage, and that my attention was never held long enough in one place for me to take in anything that was happening. Other than the fact that there was a very pregnant woman dancing, full out, with the rest of the dancers. That caught my attention more than the actual dancing did, and that's really unfortunate. It's not that the piece was bad, it's just that it didn't hold water next to the pieces that preceded it. But it was kind of a weak way to conclude the evening.

DanceBOOM! Program 2: "Illusions of Space"
The Wilma Theater (Broad and Spruce Streets)
June 8-9
Pre-show at 7PM, Curtain at 8PM
Tickets: $20-$25

Image via The Wilma.