The Rite Stuff

It’s hard to pick out a favorite moment from last weekend’s Danceworks/Present Music collaboration at the Humphrey Scottish Rite Center, so maybe I’ll just make a list.
Christal Wagner’s explosion of yellow started the concert by defiantly proclaiming that spring had arrived, regardless of recent weather patterns. Play, set to Michael Torke’s The Yellow Pages, was childlike and celebratory, lead by the puckish energy of Melissa Anderson.
Sang Shen’s gorgeous playing of Kamran Ince’s sweet melody in To Wander With brought an extra level of depth to Kim Johnson-Rockafellow’s meditative What Remains.” Johnson-Rockafellow’s focus and intensity was as passionate as Ince’s music. At one moment, she seemed to emerge from a dark pool, arms thrown back and her shoulders and face registering the shock of sun and air.
In Simone Ferro’s Blue Silence, set to music by Kevin Volans and Elena Kats-Chernin, the dancers seemed a bit crowded on the square stage, but in the last movement, the nonet erupted into a three-by-three canon, and moved with new clarity into the final haunting image.
Dani Kuepper, using a rich vocabulary of taut duets and beautifully massed conglomerations of dancers, created the best work of the evening, Lying, Cheating, Stealing. She used the space impressively, dividing it into discreet areas, each with it own style and tempo. David Lang’s music was raw and clanging (it included hubcaps as instruments), and Kuepper caught its spirit of anxiety and eventually, release. It’s the finest piece of her work I’ve seen to date. She also got to have a lot of fun with “Where the Wild Things Are,” a retelling of Maurice Sendak’s story that’s a little bit Austin Powers and a little bit Cirque du Soliel.
Jason Seed spins out long, searching melodies in Politiscapes, and Kelly Anderson matches his lines with explorations of mirror images and other symmetries spun out across the floor.
Photo by Rory Kurtz: Melissa Anderson