Colorado Dance Festival.

REVIEWED BY JANINE GASTINEAU

The entrance of a little girl in a party dress, carrying a birthday cake gleaming with candles, ushers you into the surreal world of Pat Graney's Sleep [making peace with the angels!. What follows is the stuff dreams are made of. Evocative and replete with ritual, the evening-length Sleep follows the path of women's lives from childhood, visiting adolescence, marriage, and death.

Graney's work, presented as part of the Colorado Dance Festival, is heavy with theatrics and stunning special effects: Bridal gowns are flown in from both wings, then lowered onto the upstretched arms of the dancers, and l 50 pounds of rice rain down from the ceiling upon them. A large gift package appears and reappears throughout, containing one potent object after another, spurring the action forward. Kudos go to the technical staff who kept all of this going so unobtrusively.

Graney's keen visual sense serves her well in comic moments: the women, wearing black cocktail dresses and pumps, grapple hilariously with adult sexuality land each other) on, under, and behind a large table. Amie Baca, wearing black patent leather Mary Janes, dances with childlike, graphic awkwardness and an acute deadpan expression, as if forced into some endless dance recital. Graney even pokes fun at the dream state she's trying to explore; the lights come up on a tableau, and one dancer is surprised to find herself nude amongst all her elegantly dressed friends.

More seriously, Graney's vision is just as clear when measuring the impossible standards women face. A dancer in black underwear and high heels enters, preens before an imaginary mirror, then frantically binds up thighs, waist, mouth. Then, rolling a strip of tape on the floor, she walks mincingly along the tiny runway. Graney distills a plethora of suppressive images and meaning into a brief vignette, which Amii Legendre performs chillingly.

The dancing by this Seattle-based company is terrific throughout: clean, athletic, gutsy. Several pas de deux (epecially between Legendre and Peggy Piacenza, and later, Alison Cockrill and Jean Landry) make tangible the tenderness between women. The entire company danced with a compelling combination of innocence and worldliness. Equally adept at the physical and emotional demands of the material, they never ran out of steam.