Strong steps forward
Just about every one of the seven choreographers in the fourth annual Dance Moving Forward Festival, produced by Arianne MacBean, presented strong work Thursday at the Electric Lodge in Venice.
Geordie Wright’s “Twice Removed” was an exhilarating response to the exultant Sinfonia from Bach’s “Easter” Oratorio. Televised on one of two screens facing the audience (the other showed the audience observing the work), dancers Rachel Colon, Brandy Hodges, Milva Rinaldelli and Rebecca Trigg bonded and bounded to the music. They finished the dance by running up from the downstairs studio they had been in to look at the screen and then turn quizzically to the audience.
Maria Gillespie proved to be the Twyla Tharp of tango in her consistently inventive and witty “The Shape of Interruption, Version I,” with herself and Lillian Bitkoff, Todd McQuade and Chris Stanley soloing and pairing off in various configurations yet inevitably interfering with one another’s designs and plans.
Erica Rebollar’s “Hope Code” was a severe but arresting solo incorporating martial arts poses and suggesting a quest for both transcendence and self-control, while Elizabeth Hoefner’s solo, “Andrea/Ariadne,” merged the identities of the mythic Greek heroine Ariadne and Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children. Hoefner’s intention was clarified only in her artistic statement available in the lobby, but the figure’s psychotic isolation would have been clear to anyone.
Holly Rothschild’s “She Will Not Speak,” danced by Rothschild and Bitkoff, dealt with divided selfhood through mirrored and discordant images and movements. A spoken text on tape objectified the women in a dreary academic discourse -- a pity as their intensity was more than sufficiently compelling.
Less successful were Maggie Lee’s “The Fullness of Nothing,” which utilized intriguing costumes by Sandra Burns to transform a trio of dancers into insects but couldn’t develop the idea, and Sandra Startling Cassidy’s “Box of Confections,” which dealt with women’s sexual commodification and competition but seemed driven more by ideology than movement.
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Dance Moving Forward Festival
Where: Electric Lodge, 1416 Electric Ave., Venice
When: Today, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 4 p.m.
Ends: Sunday
Price: $12 to $15
Contact: (818) 773-3380
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