In its four fall seasons, the Charlotte Dance Festival hasn’t exactly evolved into a lean, mean publicity machine. On a day when even attempting to get a seat for the headline entertainment at the grand opening of the Gantt Center proved foolhardy, there were no such difficulties at Spirit Square for the festival’s culminating event, Dance Charlotte!
Even I hadn’t heard about the event until after the festival had kicked off on Oct. 8. But if pre-publicity still needs tweaking, festival director Caroline Calouche has certainly built a stronger Dance Charlotte lineup for those who were fortunate to find out about it. Seven companies from across the Carolinas, including Calouche’s own, combined to fashion a kaleidoscope of probing, progressive modern dance at McGlohon Theatre.
South Carolina Contemporary Dance Company choreographer Miriam Barbosa brought the most conservative piece to the program — in style and subject — Dante and Beatrice, inspired by the bridge between Alighieri’s Purgatorio and Paradiso in The Divine Comedy. In diaphanous creamy white costumes, Barbosa danced this pas de deux with Serguei Chtyrkov, a sinewy performer with exquisite form and control. Music by Kodo was appropriate to the moment when Beatrice descends to Eden and begins leading Dante upwards, but a more purposeful scenario would prevent this beautiful piece from meandering.
Courtesy of the Huskey Works company, we abruptly turned from holy chaste devotion to the veiled witchery of Sybil Huskey’s Memory of Me. Danced by an expressionless Huskey to music of Osvaldo Golijov sung by Dawn Upshaw, the choreography is an elaborate ceremony of wrapping and unwrapping. The elaborately layered costume by Ka Graves provides the multiple hoods, sleeves, and sashes at the heart of Huskey’s ritual, and a gleaming blood-red mask assures that she remains hidden and expressionless. A funeral dance for a sloughed-off self? That’s what the title and the movement seem to add up to.
After these openers, from companies based in Columbia and Rock Hill, the rest of the evening was handed over to five outfits hailing from the Tarheel State. They were more mundane, abstract, or downright goofy in their preoccupations but no less polished and entertaining. I especially enjoyed the melodramatic slapstick of Sarah Emery’s Down Down Downtown, with the choreographer portraying a boss-from-hell opposite Bridget Morris’s harried employee, and Code f.a.d. Company’s Bubble, a cheeky, perversely simplified analysis of the 1929 stock market crash and its aftershocks.
Seen at past festivals, E.E. Motion and Caroline Calouche & Co. were as reliable as ever. E.E. Balcos brought us a Forward/Rewind pas de deux that he danced with Tai Dorn, while Calouche choreographed Temperature Rising, an intriguing triangle that Calouche danced with Amanda Rentschler and Brian Winn.
The only mild disappointment came from distant Wilmington with the Alban Elved Dance Company and their principal dancer/choreographer Karola Luttringhaus. I’ve seen Luttringhaus many times since Moving Poets first brought her to the Hart-Witzen Gallery six or seven years ago, and I’ve always found her to be compelling onstage. Her Facettes of the I solo was never less than the Luttringhaus I’ve admired, but the cumulative effect grew a little too self-absorbed. In part, I may have been reacting to the info in the program stating that this self-portrait was an excerpt from a larger work. I’d prefer if it were the first draft of a shorter work, but maybe an infusion of humor would please me even better.
Ah, but every second of exposure to Luttringhaus’s unique style was probably savored by those who had never seen her before. With a program like the one we saw on Saturday night, Dance Charlotte! ought to come far closer to selling out McGlohon next year. Most of us who were there will likely back for more, and I’ll bet I’m not the only one spreading the word.
This article appears in Oct 27 – Nov 2, 2009.
