COOPERATIVE IMAGES.COOPERATIVE IMAGES PARSONS DANCE COMPANY Parsons Dance is a contemporary dance company founded by choreographer David Parsons. The company tours nationally and internationally, and includes an annual season in New York, where they are based. The company consists of ten full-time dancers. IRVINE BARCLAY THEATRE IRVINE, CALIFORNIA Irvine is an incorporated city in Orange County, California, United States. It is a planned city, mainly developed by the Irvine Company since the 1960s. Formally incorporated on December 28 1971, the 69.7 square mile (180.5 km²) city has a population of 202,079 (as of 2007). FEBRUARY 25-26, 2000 The world premiere Noun 1. world premiere - (music) the first public performance (as of a dramatic or musical work) anywhere in the world performance, public presentation - a dramatic or musical entertainment; "they listened to ten different performances"; "the play ran for 100 of David Parsons's Images, co-commissioned by the Irvine Barclay Theatre and Susan and Howard Sosin Howard Sosin was born in Illinois and became a financial whiz. He was for a time an associate Professor at the Columbia Business School. He founded American International Group Financial Products in 1987 and remained there until 1993. , resonated as much for its simple, unabashed exuberance and genuine emotional connections as for Howard Schatz's striking black-and-white photographs of the company dancers. The program was rife with multimedia elements: hand-held headlamps, strobe lights, flags, and Schatz's photographs as a backdrop to Parsons's choreography. A changing montage of eager grins and grimaces, entwined limbs, and nude, muscled torsos, Schatz's vivid images strove to bring the dancers' humanity into personal focus for the audience. Subtly mimicking Parsons's movement motifs and gestures, the photos served to frame a collage of shifting scenes as the company moved seamlessly from emotion-baring duets to solos, quartets and knots of dancers creating shadow patterns with their bobbing heads. In Images, set to music by Erik Satie and Alberto Ginastera, performed live for the premiere by pianist Cristina Valdes, Parsons has whipped up a frothy froth·y adj. froth·i·er, froth·i·est 1. Made of, covered with, or resembling froth; foamy. 2. Playfully frivolous in character or content: a frothy French farce. love cocktail for his dancers, spiked with emotions both tender and angry, playful and passionate. Gently cradled heads, nuzzled necks and cupped hands made one soft, sensuous duet seem more intimate than most love scenes; later, dancers Robert Battle and Elizabeth Koeppen went ballistic as a "let's fight and then make up again" couple. Like the other works in the evening-length concert--the ambient and jazzy jazz·y adj. jazz·i·er, jazz·i·est 1. Resembling jazz in form or nature; rhythmical. 2. Slang Showy; flashy: a jazzy car. light-study Fill The Woods With Light; Parsons's popular signature solo piece Caught, ably performed by a strobe-lit Jaime Martinez; and the finale, a flag-waving Anthem that was sadly anticlimactic an·ti·cli·max n. 1. A decline viewed in disappointing contrast with a previous rise: the anticlimax of a brilliant career. 2. in its lack of thematic cohesiveness--Images relies on another medium to complete its effect. In spite of the pleasing pairing of Parsons's deftly nuanced, witty choreography and his company's easy theatricality and powerful athleticism, this new piece seems to have only skimmed the surface of its potential. In performance it works--as both a joyous homage to Parsons's dancers and as an expressive artistic collaboration--but at the end of the night it is Schatz's evocative photographic images that linger. |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion