Project Description
DANCE REVIEW: GroundWorks DanceTheater at Cain Park
On Saturday evening 7/18, we hooked up with a friend and walked over to Cain Park to catch GroundWorks DanceTheater at the Alma Theater. As it does most years, GroundWorks at the Alma kicks off the summer dance season for 2015.
The first dance on the program was House Broken, a hilarious spoof of suburban life created on GroundWorks by Rosie Hererra. In our review of the world premiere last February, we enjoyed the darkly humorous satire but regretted that House Broken didn’t give the GroundWorks dancers a sufficient chance to do what they do best, dance.
Watching this summer’s production of House Broken, we found that it had weathered cast changes nicely, emerging mostly better and funnier than before. Part of the improvement was a matter of the dancers putting a face on the movement.
Not to give too much away, but say — hypothetically — that you’re a dancer assigned to make like a lawn sprinkler, literally spitting water about on the stage. Are you a happy lawn sprinkler? Sad? Or, because you are a lawn sprinkler, have always been a lawn sprinkler, are you merely matter of fact about being a lawn sprinkler? Deadpan. A veritable Buster Keaton among lawn sprinklers. A lawn sprinkler may get along fine without pointed feet and fantastic fan kicks; the hard part is putting a face on it. And that’s what the GroundWorks dancers, especially newcomers Lauren Garson and Michael Marquez, did well in the current production ofHouse Broken. Catch it this summer if you can.
The world premiere of the evening, Remora, choreographed by Eric Michael Handman in collaboration with the GroundWorks dancers, is not an easy dance to talk about because it is an abstract composition, a technical exploration rather than a story ballet or a dance of ideas.
What’s the dancing in Remora like? A few minutes into this dance, we realized that the flailing limbs and multiple off-center turns that we had expected from Handman were nowhere in evidence. Instead we saw movements with an extra measure of twist and snap and an emphasis on controlled finishes. As promised in the program note, this dance is highly physical and demanding in its nuances and complexities. Remorasuccessfully engaged the talents of the five Groundworks dancers and the rapt attention of the audience for 19 minutes.
Speaking of highly physical dance works, GroundWorks finished the evening with 2009′s Boom Boom, artistic director David Shimotakahara’s unconventional but compelling take on the blues. If you’re a connoisseur of the music, you might applaud the inclusion of Mae “Big Mama” Thornton’s (original!) version of Hound Dog or Robert Belfour’s Black Mattie.
Much of the dancing in Boom Boom is built around a very sturdy blue wall positioned upstage. People are said to “hit a wall,” “climb the walls” and be “up against the wall,” but the GroundWorks dancers do all that and more. Hard. Over and over. Boom Boom must be an exhausting dance to perform but it’s exhilarating to watch.
GroundWorks performs at two more venues this summer, both of them outdoors and free. Catch them if you can and take a friend. They’ll be at Akron’s Glendale Cemetery Fri 7/31 and Sat 8/1 @ 8:45PM as part of the Heinz Poll Summer Dance Festival, and at Lincoln Park in Tremont Fri 8/14 at 8:30pm as part of the Arts in August series.