ODC/Dance presents
ODC/Dance Downtown
Yerba Buena Center for
the Arts Theater, San Francisco
March 22nd,
2015
ODC/Dance marked its
44th home season with the annual yearly program at Yerba Buena Center for the
Arts, ODC/Dance Downtown. Weekend one welcomed the return of last year’s boulders and bones, choreography by
Brenda Way and KT Nelson, while the second weekend brought a set of world
premieres – Nelson’s Dead Reckoning
and another Way/Nelson collaborative project, The Invention of Wings.
The curtain rose on Dead Reckoning to immediately erupting
action, like the start of a race. Dancers turned, jumped and dived around the
stage in a swirl of movement, resembling fireworks. Legs kicked outward and
arms pushed through space; Nelson’s choreographic vocabulary an unexpected
combination of punchy and sculptural. Dead
Reckoning reads as an A-B-A structure, with a fast, slow, fast section breakdown.
Throughout each of these chapters, the motion was continuous; every instant feeding
seamlessly into the next. By avoiding stops and starts, Nelson connected the
dance’s sub-sections and kept the forward motion going. While that
connectedness and continuity was a great achievement in Dead Reckoning, the middle section (the slow one) had its challenges.
The movement intention definitely carried through and it had some beautiful
solos (particularly by Jeremy Smith, Josie G. Sadan and Katherine Wells) but
the functionality and purpose of this lengthy meditation was unclear. In the
last movement of Dead Reckoning, we
were treated to a pas de deux, danced by Natasha Adorlee Johnson and Joseph
Hernandez, one of ODC’s most exciting pairings. Their pas de deux was brief,
but these two dancers are simply electric when they are on stage together.
Design-wise, lime green ‘snow’ (concept by ODC company dancer Yayoi Kambara)
was utilized during the whole dance – falling from the rafters and from the
hands of the dancers. By the end of Dead
Reckoning, the stage was bathed in this snow, reminiscent of Pina Bausch’s Carnations.
Pictured: Corey Brady and Natasha Adorlee Johnson Photo: RJ Muna |
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