DANCE REVIEW : Highways’ Women’s Festival Celebrates a Kind of Inclusivity

As if the female gender could be glimpsed by chart or through a glass, Highways calls its third annual Women’s Festival “Maps and Windows.” Nevertheless, the title, as metaphor, made an apt setup for Thursday’s opening event in this two-month exposition.

Neither did it push exclusivity as a point of view--happily, the male gender was everywhere indicated (even in the audience), if not implicated: in Hae Kyung Lee’s “Blank Slate,” a duet she performed with Frank Adams, collaborative elements were the province of composer Steve Moshier and designer Stephen Bennett.

And while Melinda Ring’s “Recompense” was a solo for herself, the trusty Naoyuki Oguri (lighting) and Paul Chavez (sound score) were on hand, as was dancer Christopher Martinez in Rebecca Romero’s “Wake Up Wonderbread Tio Tomboys.”

In fact, the evening celebrated a kind of inclusivity . Ring’s piece, for instance, was hardly a polemic about women’s minority status. At its best, “Recompense” made a statement about the human condition, although one could easily read particular meanings in its abstraction.

What sounded like furious metal scrapings hyperamplified (someone scraping pots clean?) became the background for a woman’s similarly furious machinations--all arms and elbows seen from the neck up, behind a fence. But the grief and solitude and mania, as developed in this overlong work, could belong to either sex.

On the other hand, Romero addressed gender issues specifically in her “Wake Up” text, given gently but hilariously comic narration by violinist-performer Wendy Ultan. As a winking tattooed tough, Romero talks about “a girlish type of a boy and a boyish type of a girl” and shares the wealth of her good-natured humor, which invites no exclusivity.