Expertly danced 'Colony' delights
Anna Drozdowski's dance-centered Thirdbird and Dustin Hurt's music-centered Bowerbird have been bringing innovative and often startlingly brilliant artists to Philadelphia for several years.
Anna Drozdowski's dance-centered Thirdbird and Dustin Hurt's music-centered Bowerbird have been bringing innovative and often startlingly brilliant artists to Philadelphia for several years.
One of those presenting organizations' most successful collaborations included dancer/performance artist Eleanor Bauer two years ago. Her "Big Girls Do Big Things" was so smart and engaging, I reacted with great excitement when I heard she was returning. On Thursday night at Christ Church Neighborhood House, she opened a short run - which by the time you read this will mercifully be over. Except for the good part, which comes later.
Bauer has a respectable resumé, having danced with pathfinding choreographers such as Xavier Le Roy and Rosas/Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and is now artist-in-residence at Kaaitheater in Brussels, Belgium. But the eponymous, 2005 Eleanor - Bauer's hour of off-handed, self-indulgent lecturing on the plight of committed, though exploited, dancers and artists - included only a few minutes of dance near the exasperating end. And that consisted mostly of repetitious reverse cantering and minimalist twerking.
Although Bauer's dance involvement includes stints as a grant writer, editor for Movement Research, and behind-the-scenes worker, her overtly ironic rant was a personal reflection on what she called the three "economies in the arts": passion, recognition, and money.
A stunned and unresponsive, though polite, audience listened as she seemed to realize she was laying an egg. When two men walked out, she protested that she would soon dance. Thirdbird should have waited until she hatched another substantial work to bring to us.
So here's the good part: Although Friday night's show was to be a double bill with Eleanor and Melissa Krodman and Kelly Bond's expertly danced Colony, Saturday night is back to a single bill with just Colony.
I saw it in 2012 and am still impressed. It's a Bauhausian work powered by pace, pulse, pattern, and two pretty young dancers in striped leotards and sneakers. But don't be fooled by the adorable pout of their scarlet-painted lips, or the sassy flip of their hairdos. Their utterly mesmerizing, synchronous, 50-minute duet is geometrically formed and balanced and marked by pedestrian movement. They jog around the space or walk in place surrounded by standing audience members. When they stop in front of you, deadpan, and sing, "We are singular sensations," you'll likely agree.
