ADF Review: Abby Zbikowski’s Tectonic Erupts from a High-Energy, Low-Stakes Footprints, Ending the ADF Season on a Joyful Note
Footprints ★★★½ Jul. 20 & 21 Reynolds Industries Theater, Durham Every year, I’m reminded why I love the American Dance Festivals’s Footprints show. Usually concluding the season, it features the work of the festival’s commissioned choreographers and stars its students. A few choreographers have the luxury of spending six weeks focused on creating wholly new…
Dance Review: Justin Tornow and COMPANY’s Maze of Dance-Tech Dioramas Illuminates Compelling Questions About Autonomy and Art
COMPANY: SHOW ★★★ ½ Jul. 11–15 The Fruit, Durham For a show that consists of things happening inside boxes, SHOW is awfully hard to put in a box. Premiering at The Fruit last week, the virtually un-googleable performance installation by Justin Tornow and COMPANY is a maze of dance-tech dioramas in which enticements for free-range…
ADF Review: Dancer Tamisha Guy Steals the Show in Kyle Abraham’s Almost Unbearably Intimate Dearest Home
Kyle Abraham’s “A.I.M.” ★★★★ Jul. 17–19 Von der Heyden Studio Theater, Durham I’ve heard it said that marriage is ultimately little more than two naked people together in an empty room. That is, you bring to the partnership nothing more than yourself, with all the concomitant baggage. That concept came to mind while I was…
ADF Review: Heady Deconstructionist Tere O’Connor’s Long Run Is More Engaging in Theory than Practice
Tere O’Connor ★★ Jul. 10 & 11 Reynolds Industries Theater, Durham Something is amiss when a choreographer’s theories prove more engaging than the work that embodies them. This was the case with Long Run, Tere O’Connor’s newest work, commissioned by the American Dance Festival. Critics and audiences have long celebrated the specificity of the choreographer’s…
Performance Review: In Parcours, JoRose Explores the Spiritual Experience of Growth in a Limiting Physical World
Johanna Rose Burwell: Parcours★★★ July 5–7 The Fruit, Durham Parcours, the new performance piece that Johanna Rose Burwell (aka JoRose) premiered at The Fruit last week, is an exploration of the spiritual experience of growth in a physical world and the limits placed on it by the body, the mind, and society. “This is a…
ADF Review: In an Era of Tested Faith, the Buoyancy of Rosie Herrera’s Belief Might Just See Us Through
Rosie Herrera Dance Theatre: Make Believe ★★★★ Friday, Jul. 6 & Saturday, Jul. 7 Reynolds Industries Theater, Durham Choreographer Rosie Herrera still has the power to astonish us. If she retains her usual ability to effectively edit her own work, then Make Believe, which had its world premiere Friday night at the American Dance Festival,…
ADF Review: L-E-V’s OCD Love Purports to Be About Missed Connections, but We Saw Something Else Entirely
L-E-V: OCD Love ★★★ Tuesday, July 3 Durham Performing Arts Center, Durham Program notes can be a lifesaver. The short text explaining a show’s inspiration or meaning often serves as a map lighting up an otherwise inscrutable performance. Sometimes, though, they lead to a dead end. That’s how I felt watching OCD Love, a work…
More Dance Review Coverage
Dance Review: The Many Moving Parts of The Bipeds’ 54 Strange Words Don’t Always Perfectly Mesh. But When They Do, It’s Spectacular.
The Bipeds: 54 Strange Words ★★★½Thursday, Jun. 21–Sunday, Jun. 24 The Fruit, Durham Perhaps halfway through local dance-music company The Bipeds’54 Strange Words, which premiered as the closer in the DIDA season near the end of June, I saw something I’ll never forget. Dana Marks, whom you likely know as an actor and director with…
Murielle Elizéon Sifts the Ashes of Racism, Sexism, Cultural Displacement, Domestic Violence, and Her Relationship with Her Father in Brown
Sunday, Jul. 8 (2 & 7 p.m.) & Monday, Jul. 9 (7 p.m.) The Fruit, Durham www.americandancefestival.org This is a condensed version of our review of the premiere of Brown at Monkey Bottom Collaborative last December. Murielle Elizéon sets the scene for Brown, her hour-long dance solo, by telling the story of reconnecting with her…
ADF Review: Anne Plamondon Portrays Her Childhood Experience of Her Father’s Schizophrenia with Skill, Intelligence, and Genuine Vulnerability
Anne Plamondon ★★★★ Saturday, Jun. 30 & Sunday, Jul. 1 Von der Heyden Studio Theater, Durham “I was scared,” Anne Plamondon says during her solo show, The Same Eyes as Yours, about visiting her father in a mental hospital when she was a small child. And that’s all I could think about during the piece:…
ADF Review: A Concert of Dance by Returning Alumni Reminds Us That Sometimes, You Can’t Go Home Again
Coming Home: ADF Alumni Return ★★ Saturday, Jun. 23 & Sunday, Jun. 24 Reynolds Industries Theater, Durham Homecomings can be bittersweet affairs, and ADF’s alumni showcase was a particularly dispiriting one. It’s hard to imagine that more than a hundred other submitted dance works were less accomplished than the mostly unfortunate quintet selected by a…
ADF Review: Pilobolus’s Crowd-Pleasing Dance Is Apolitical. Unfortunately, the World It Inhabits Is Not.
Pilobolus ★½ Thursday, Jun. 21 & Friday, Jun. 22 Durham Performing Arts Center, Durham Pilobolus exempts itself from politics. The dance company wants you to escape the real world and have a good time for a couple of hours. It wants to give you a handful of chuckles and elicit some oohs and aahs in…
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.