Dance festival showcases student talent

Though it may not feel like spring has sprung just yet, the dancers in the Spring Dance Festival, performed last weekend in Richardson Auditorium, filled the room with such energy that most in the audience forgot the chilling winds outside.

Performed mainly by students in the Program in Theater and Dance, as well as by others who take dance classes, the festival is definitely one of the hidden gems of Princeton's arts scene.

The show opened with a piece entitled "Coming Through," a pulsing tribally-themed dance. Bare-midriffed women and shirtless men struck angular poses that often evoked aboriginal hunters. Appropriately, percussion dominated the music for this dance. And lines were one of the prevailing visual themes: the dancers, nine girls plus Dusan Perovic '05 and Kevin Simmons '03, formed rows for many of the key segments of the piece.

"Coming Through" was definitely the most inviting piece for the dance novices in the audience and was a great choice for the opening dance.

It was followed by the more creative and interpretive "Back Home Suite," a collection of four separate but related pieces all incorporating a large green armchair as a prop.

Prince arts writer, Indre Vengris '04, began the suite with a tortured performance entitled "Six Legs." The piece was set to spoken word instead of traditional music. The soulless voice on the loudspeaker repeated phrases such as "The shirt is on the chair" over and over again. This certainly gave an eerie quality to the piece and elicited feelings of slight discomfort from the audience as they watched Vengris' willowy form sway and contort in anguish.

"Six Legs" was balanced by the lightheartedness of the following piece, "Dad's Chair," performed by Laura Johnson '04, who pretended to be a child playing in her father's chair when no one is looking.

This was followed by "Circuitry," a futuristic partner dance performed by Julia Friedlander '06 and Josiah Pearsall '03.

The suite ended with Lara Ionescu '06 in "Anyone Home?" Ionescu's heart-wrenching performance recalled moments of loneliness that many in the audience could certainly relate to. The piece ended with her running in circles and stopping periodically, each time realizing that she was still alone.

Perovic returned to the festival after the suite, in "Balkan Memories." As its name suggests, this piece heavily incorporated elements from Perovic's native Yugoslavia. Dressed in a traditional costume, Perovic drew on what were certainly customary dances from his homeland as Balkan music played in the background.

Following the Balkan piece, the festival briefly transitioned to a classical style with "Seven Years Apart." The female dancers, dancing in the first piece of the evening to incorporate heavy elements of ballet, performed this piece in three segments, the first upbeat, the second somber and the third happy again.

By far the most humorous piece of the festival was "Two Girls Walkin' Home Last Night." Sarah Keller '03 and Melanie Velo-Simpson '04 pranced onto the stage dressed in an undisguised mockery of 'Street' attire: bold neon skirts and spandex with gloriously mismatched neon tops.

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Keller and Velo-Simpson then proceeded to twirl and flop around each other in mock drunken revelry. Finely executing their inebriated ceremony, their movements purposely lacked the smoothness found in other pieces.

Also charming was Katherine Durlacher '05 in her performance of "Slipperflippers." Durlacher, whose costume was quite the explosion of colors and shapes, jumped around the stage with childish enthusiasm.

When she discovered a pair of slippers that were even more outrageous than she, she celebrated her finding by jumping around even more. She slid in and out of the slippers and even put them on her hands, performing what at times appeared to be an elaborate mating ritual with her slippers.

Other performances included an elegant and uplifting dance by Marianne Yip '03, a very precise dancer, in "Sanctuary," and "Two and Three," in which five girls, each dressed in a different vibrant color, bent and swayed in groups of two and three.

"I was inspired to create my piece 'Sanctuary' after taking Ze'eva Cohen's dance seminar 'Sacred Dance' in which we studied the ritualistic nature of dance," Yip wrote in an email. "Through my work, I attempted to express the contrast of finding comfort vs. experiencing feelings of fear and apprehension and the journey of finding a balance between the two."

Laura Chiang '05, performed "Currents" while wearing a nightgown and dancing to Debussy, and Mattie Brickman '05 and Candace Mootoo '05 also danced to Debussy in their performance, called "Tip of the Wing."

"All of the work [performed in the festival] is created and developed during the fall semester and polished/tweaked and costumed over reading period," Pearsall wrote in an email.

While some of the dances are choreographed by the students, the dance program also invites two guest choreographers each year to create some dances as well, Pearsall said. This year the guests were Stephen Welsh and Jessica Lang.

Other dances, like the final one, were choreographed by Diann Sichel as she taught her students in DAN 319.

The evening closed with a hypnotic dance featuring many female dancers and Pearsall as the sole male. In "Gravitational Yearnings," the girls, wearing diaphanous two-piece costumes, were repeatedly drawn and repelled, perhaps by gravity, to a central girl.

They danced to a surreal combination of tinkling sounds and bass tones as stars and a moon were projected onto the back curtain. It was the perfect finale to leave a previously satisfied audience yearning for more, that is, next year's show.