Performances Galore!

It's been so long since my last post!! Once you're in the groove of things here at ADF, you tend to forget the outside world and time passes so fast! I can't believe it's been over two weeks since my last post because it feels like just yesterday that the festival even began. I was planning to write a post over a week ago about the performances we had seen so far and give you my own personal in-depth analysis of all the companies, but now there are so many that I'm just gonna give you a few tidbits and some videos instead.

Rosas - ROSAS DANST ROSAS
Four women, a lot of repetition, powerful, eye-catching, really really liked it! Here's an excerpt of the piece...not sure why it's being performed in a room that looks like an institution, but we saw it on a stage obviously haha.

Yossi Berg & Oded Graf - Animal Lost
Well, this was special. Animal masks, Israeli, shaking their hips for long periods of time, random words (i.e. saying "sausages, sausages, sausages" over and over again). In general it was hilarious, but definitely not what I would call a good piece.

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company - D Man in the Water
Bill T. Jones performed three pieces, which were all beautiful. For some reason, at some point in each of the pieces I just wanted to cry because it was touching without you really knowing why. The highlight of the show was the last piece D Man in the Water that ADF had reconstructed for Charles L. Reinhart's last year. I wouldn't necessarily say that Jones' movement is extremely interesting but he really knows how to make use of his dancers and create a great piece visually and that is really powerful. Definitely loved this piece! Here's a clip of my favorite part.

Tao Dance Theater - 2
This is Tao Dance Theater's US premiere and the two dancer company is also in residence at ADF for the summer. They are certainly two very striking dancers with their sinewy movements and shaved heads. I love to watch them and was so excited for this show. However, even though their movement was very interesting, they utilized repetition too much and made their interesting movement really mundane because there were no dynamics or new ideas introduced. Also the music was a little hard to stand. So, beautiful dancers, not such a beautiful piece.

Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Evidence A Dance Company
So DCDC had great dancers but I didn't particularly enjoy either of their pieces. They definitely had beastly dancers but one of their pieces Vespers brought up the question of whether you can be artistic while also utilizing a lot of technique (i.e. turns/pirouettes in this case). It's definitely a fine line. Evidence on the the other hand, well they basically remind me of how uncool I am because their dancers are these gorgeous, funky, strong black dancers and they just put the rest of us to shame. However, even though their dancers are great, I'm not super impressed with their pieces. One of them was cute but just seemed like a dance party on stage. The other Grace was better and I had seen it previously back in DC. The most interesting part of Ron K. Brown's work for Evidence is his ability to be funky while also having a reverential quality. Not a great for me but definitely fun!

So, I tried to keep it brief but I was definitely getting more verbose as the post went on...oops. I've had many other adventures in the last two weeks but I'll share those with y'all another time. I'm just enjoying all my classes, which I love, and time spent on our porch reading and going out to dinner and having a beer with good friends. Great times!