ARTSCAPE

IMAGO moves — UC San Diego, October 26th, 2006

November 1st, 2006

I attended the opening-night performance of IMAGO moves at the gorgeous Molli and Arthur Wagner Dance Building at UC San Diego. IMAGO moves presented Garden Trilogy.

Yolande Snaith, Artistic Director of IMAGO moves, is an award-winning choreographer for the stage and film, and created the choreography for Stanley Kubrick’s terrific film, Eyes Wide Shut.

The first piece, Ghost Garden, was a thrilling, complex, fully formed work that succeeded on many levels, reminding me of the best that dance can be. In fact, and before I read the program note that mentioned the Kubrick film, I had the strong notion of cinematic choreography, and I don’t think I’d ever had that impression or experience before.

Film, of course, is a collaborative medium. And, film is very much like opera — the costumes, the sets, the lighting, the detailed story, the score, and the actors/singers/dancers combine to provide a rich sensory experience for the viewer. Ghost Garden was like this.

Cinematic choreography. Visual choreography. Dancing that stimulates, dancing that makes you think, dancing that causes new associations to form in your brain. Ghost Garden presented a series of novel images, scenes that were both archetypal and future-directed. In one unique sequence, prompted by the choreography, I imagined Sir Walter Raleigh and his ladies playing cosmic croquet using Star Wars light sabres as mallets.

The dancers were stupendous. In Ghost Garden the four women and two men presented grace, beauty, intelligence, and sensuality. Sensual, graceful intelligence. That’s a hot combination.

The four women, Alison Dietterle Smith, Erica Nordin, Raffaella Judd, and Sadie Weinberg, demonstrated marvelous technique. Long legs and arms, clean, tight turns, beautifully pointed feet, strong extensions, wonderful balance, and full dance vocabularies in both allegro and adagio sections.

The two men, John Diaz and Robby Johnson, were excellent partners and provided supplementary masculine focus and energy.

All six dancers demonstrated deep musicality, filling out the phrases consistently and completely. All dancers performed with joy, dedication, and attention to stagecraft, quietly reveling in their training and muscularity, reveling in their bodies-as-machines.

The costumes and sets were extremely interesting and provocative, heightening the imaginative rewards of the lucky viewers.

Cinematic choreography. All theatrical elements contributing to a fully realized creation. A stage continually filled with stimulating activity, not necessarily spread across the stage but occurring at discrete corners and places of visual power.

Ghost Garden is dance theater of the highest order.

Entry Filed under: Dance