Contemporary Baroque (Dominic Walsh Dance Theater), March 18, 2005, Miller Outdoor Theater

The nice thing about free performances is that you don't feel guilty seeing the same works over again. You also don't feel guilty if you have to leave early to pick your friend up at the airport. Last night I caught the first half of the encore performance of Contemporary Baroque (see post from January 8, 2005). It's so wonderful to see dances more than once - you catch so much more the second time, even if it's been two months since you first saw it. The movement vocabulary for Bacchus's Cup is almost entirely gestural. This fact struck me so strongly last night that I don't understand how I could have failed to mention it in my last post. The use of gesture inspired the movement throughout the piece in a very unifying fashion. With an exquisite arch of his back at the beginning of his solo, Dominic Walsh showed us how masterful his dancing can be. I found myself studying his torso to see how he used it to characterize his movement. Sadly, the lighting design for this piece was nowhere near as effective as it was at Zilkha Hall. I can't get excited about lighting that fails to illuminate all the dancers, at least not when that clearly isn't the choreographer's intent. And while I'm all for postmodern deconstructivism, someone needs to tell these choreographers that theaters have drops and wings for a reason! It would be nice to leave them there once in a while - don't always count on the backstage area to define your space for you. It can be an effective tool, but it's overused in this show. That said, this effect really made sense for Quartett Letters. Quartett Letters was restaged to some degree, with the dancers in white reading the text instead of an actor. This made the piece come together for me, as they now had a purpose besides apparent window dressing, and it integrated the text with the dancing. Either the shiny white pants were replaced with dull ones or the lighting was totally different; either way, I have to say I kind of missed the effect.