Dance Recital Review: Dance Fusion
By Justin Smith
I wept. Let me just say from the outset that when confronted with immense beauty I have been known to leak a few. But I certainly wasn’t prepared for what I encountered Friday night at Dance Fusion, held at the John Anthony Theater at the Spring Creek Campus of Collin College.
The moment in question was the second to last number, performed by Muscle Memory Dance Theatre out of Dallas. The name of the piece was Under the Yellow Sky, choreographed by Lesley Snelson-Figueroa. As the lights came up, there were two swings hanging from the fifty foot ceiling and four dancers appeared wearing black and white. From there it gets a bit hazy. I know there were three sections in the piece, demarcated by first purple, then orange, and finally black as the backdrop colors. The whole piece in its entirety is hard to describe, but what I can say is that if you were to film the piece with a high speed camera, every millisecond when render a stage picture so breathtaking that it would leave you in total awe. Somewhere in the middle, I became overwhelmed by the music, the motion, and the colors that I felt Divine Transcendence touch my shoulder. What can I say? You should go see this show.
Muscle Memory jumps to new heights.
Dance Fusion is a show the features the local talents of the Collin Dance Ensemble, Elledanceworks Dance Company, Muscle Memory Dance Theatre, and the not local Janice Garrett and Dancers from San Francisco. The show was opened and closed by the Janice Garret and Dancers performing Brink (Excerpt) and Archimedes’ Revenge, respectively. I remember the first was like watching water whip around the stage as the dancers undulated up and down and in and out of sight from the audience. It was extremely flowy and did not have the course angles or hardness one usually finds with modern dance. The Janice Garrett Dancers also performed another piece just before intermission, Fast Brass, which was truly amazing to see. The piece was extremely fast and the dancers accented the music by fast shaking hands and faces. When they would walk, it seemed a bit comical as the dancers would strut around on stage with stiff arms swinging at their sides, looking like an old Keystone Cops film.
Both Elledanceworks and Collin Dance Ensemble were very good also. Elledanceworks' piece, Wavering Reflections, had three ladies in what looked to be something like white pajamas and each one was holding a long wooden stick. With the sticks the dancers looked to be about ten feet tall as they would never stand up straight while the sticks were standing straight. Either the dancers were swaying at an angle or the poles were at an angle and it produced a very strange effect. The Collin Dance ensemble performed three pieces, and it was obvious that there strength lay in classical training. The second piece they performed was called Conspirare, and it was a mixture of classical and modern dance. When given the opportunity to rely on their apparent ballet training, they really shined.
You can catch Dance Fusion again Saturday the 10th at 2:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. I say you should drop everything and go see this show. Who doesn’t desperately need a little more beauty in their life?
