Dance Fever

DTG performs Particular Pieces

November 20, 2007

Dance Theatre Group's fall concert, Particular Pieces, showcased an eclectic array of professionally choreographed contemporary dances at Mathers Theatre over the weekend.

DTG performed choreographer Trisha Brown's "Glacial Decoy," Teena Custer's "At Arms Length," and faculty choreographers Karl Rogers' "Be Right Back," and Rachel Boggia's "At or Near Tc."

Bessie Award-winning dancer Vicky Shick restaged an excerpt from "Glacial Decoy," a landmark work by Brown, the 2007 Dickinson Arts Award recipient. Accompanied by projections of photographs of the Carlisle area by Pierce Bounds '71 and Elizabeth Parks '08, "Glacial Decoy" toys with the audience's imagination about the world beyond the proscenium by allowing the dance to slip in and out of the wings of the stage. The performance took place a week after Brown received the 2007 Dickinson Arts Award.

Postgraduate fellow Rogers' "Be Right Back" caused alarm and then chuckles in the audience when actress Elizabeth Geekas, seated in row L of the house, received a cell phone call in the opening moments of the piece. As Geekas wandered onto the stage, commenting on how "serious" the dancers were, she seemed to erase the line between audience and performer.

In "At Arms Length," Custer, a guest hip-hop theatre choreographer, structured old-school hip-hop movement vocabulary for the stage, using the new form of hip-hop dance theatre to present hip-hop dance as a means for exploring social injustice. The all female cast performed high-energy moves most often performed by men to a soundtrack peppered with stories of violence toward women.

"At or Near Tc" is a style dance that used the movement of electrons in superconducting metals as a score for the performance. Dancers collided, rolled and leaped in complex patterns, representing the way that the behaviors of electrons change as temperatures drop.