Lost in Space
Under the Skin | Rondo | Machinas Simples: Excerpts 1, V, 1V
You could hear the DanceBOOM! beat blocks away, a huge whoomp barreling down Broad Street. These were the young drummers of the N.E. Frankford Boys and Girls Club's American Legion Post 224 Drill Team, whamming out the beat for their spectacular drill squad. Sharing the pre-performance show were young troopers of the Nicetown Stars Dance Team, a bevy of talented beauties ranging from age 5 to 13.
The intensity the kids brought to their performance owed nothing to ambition and everything to pride. Inside the theater, the pros brought intensity of a different kind to Illusions of Space, DanceBOOM! Program Two. "How do you open up, layer, or even dissolve stage space?" they asked with their bodies.
Bridgman/Packer Dance (Myrna and Art) started the evening with Under the Skin, an astonishing dance/video experience, merging the real and unreal into the surreal. With wailing jazz sounds and saxophone of Ken Field as accompaniment, the twosome danced in front of moving graphics that they simultaneously disappeared into, floated above and almost always had superimposed on their bodies. They transformed into each other with their white petticoats serving as projection screens. Images distorted, body parts passed between Bridgman and Packer. It was fabulous.
Rondo from Group Motion was more serene. Created in a collaboration between the locals and Leni-Basso Dance Company (Japan), it reflected the stillness associated with Eastern cultures. Dancers in white moved on a white square, which was raised to an angle above the stage, allowing dancers to move under it, or to dangle at the top edge. Soft but emphatic percussive sounds accompanied them. It was visually striking, especially at the end when a large pendulum swung across the stage and the dancers moved carefully across the space, passing inches from its trajectory, or lay down to let it drift over them.
Machinas Simples: Excerpts 1, V,1V, choreographed by Silvana Cardell of Group Motion, was not simple. There were onstage dancers at a drawing board with a back screen showing video excerpts of what they were doing; meanwhile, another smaller screen focused on close-up details. The sound of a pencil on paper accompanied much of this. Unfortunately, it never came together in any meaningful way. Eventually you just wanted it to end, or better yet, bring back the kids.
Illusions of Space
June 6, DanceBOOM!, Wilma Theater
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