About an hour of dance

Last night I was downtown at 3 Legged Dog (3LD), an art and technology center for large scale art installations.  Reid Farrington, a multimedia artist, was presenting his multimedia installation/performance The Passion Project.  But the evening also featured his guest, BODYART, a multimedia modern dance company.  Artistic director of BODYART, Leslie Scott, collaborated with Reid for the company’s evening-length work, an hour about an hour.  Two of BODYART’s dancers are friends of mine and fellow TCU dance grads, and it was cool to see them doing what we all want to do, dancing professionally in a city like NY!

Like me, Leslie was a modern dance major at TCU before coming up to New York. I have seen excerpts of her work at school, but I was excited to see a complete piece of her choreography for the first time (Side note: Leslie is also a great photographer. She interned with Lois Greenfield, goddess of dance photography, and comes back to TCU to shoot the senior dance majors head shots and dance shots. Thanks to her I have some fierce dance photos!).  Reid produced a film that provided a backdrop for the dance, and he also provided the lighting and scenic design (several bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling).  The film was both mesmerizing and haunting and seemed to give the dance a setting that was suspended in time. The hanging light bulbs captivated some dancers, but seemed to frighten others.

All of the dancers attacked the movement athletically: one second they were twisting on the ground, the next they were bounding through the air, and soon after one was perched on another’s back. an hour about an hour also featured innovative partnering that asked the dancers to commit not only to their own movement but to each other.  Their space was not large and the floor was quite hard, but these dancers did not let that stop them from embracing the expansive movement and diving into the floor (literally, everyone entered the space via dive roll at one point), never losing their connection with each other.

If you’d like to check out this work, you can see the last performance at 9PM on July 17, 2008 at 3LD (80 Greenwich St, at Rector St., NY).  For more information about this company go to www.bodyartdance.com.