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Fall Forward  brings student run pieces to front

Largely student-choreographed show runs the full gamut

by Lauren Viera

This year's Fall Forward  dance concert showcases choreographer's personal desires in the form of dance.

Oberlin students choreographed six of the seven pieces featured. With spotlights on everything from group synergy to absurdist conversations, the concert displays ample satisfaction for dance buffs and newcomers alike.

For the most part, the acts steer clear of traditionalist expectations, never ceasing to offer their audience a new dimension of art - through a student perspective.

Junior Bec Conant's choreographing of Syzygy  led off the evening with five dancers frolicking to the harmonious, folk-like energy of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra's "Music for a Found Harmonium."

Conant is said to have heard the music a few years back, imagining the piece in her head as she listened to it. The results: pairs of dancers in flowing collaborations with one another, running and tumbling with child-like energy and forming as one large group to close the piece.

Parallel to Conant's piece was sophomore Steffany Haaz's sextet choreographed work, You Can Take It With You , a similar collaboration of lucid female dancers struggling to find their independence through group support.

The individuals come together at the start of Michael Manring's "Wide Asleep;" a refreshingly up-beat contemporary piece breeding life and remarkable spring into its interpreters' leaps as they intermix, bounding across the stage. Simple in concept as it may seem, Take It With You  does incorporate a somewhat deeper meaning into the eye-pleasing traditional style of the dancers' movements.

Throughout the on-going actions of the group together, individual dancers run astray for a bit, facing the audience with a slight look of confusion or longingness, only to be rushed into the group again after a moment of solitude.

The effect is well-crafted, presenting a contrast between the freedom of a solo and the comfort of group unison. The piece could easily be classified as a non-complicated prototypical dance number, aside from these askew moments of solo-to-audience interaction.

Junior Keely Meehan choreographs and performs Fall Forward 's only solo, Monologue . "It's my way of expressing what I don't have words for," said Meehan. Deemed a "structured improv," the work is set to Nine Inch Nails' A Warm Place . "It's highly personal," said Meehan of the piece's meaning. "I'm just hoping to have a good run of it."

The most interesting - if not the most startling - piece was set to the music of TIMARA major, senior Eoin Russell, with live cello accompaniment from Jenalee Vaughn. Entitled ID4 , six human fan blades began spinning around in unison as soon as the initial drone of music took off into full-fledged electronic ambiance.

Then, as if to break the monotony, the dancers unexpectedly began to climb on each other in a desperate attempt to play. Eerily blending with the pulsations of their soundtrack, the adult playmates begin to act increasingly violent with one another as the music distorts. Ending with couples interlocked on all fours, ID4  proved to be one of the odder additions to Fall Forward .

More bizarre still was A Fine How Do You Do In Four Parts , whose title is only somewhat explanatory. Juniors Per Eisenman, Merril "Max" Truax and Rafael Cohen collaborated to choreograph the non-musical piece.

"We originally designed the piece in three or four days," said Eisenman, "and pretty much auditioned without any expectations."

Though it does incorporate an initially basic conversation between two young men, the circumstances are what make it hard to swallow, if not darkly comical.

The two conversationalists are dressed in coveralls, while the accompanying circle of male "dancers," dressed solely in boxers and tank tops. These men remain stationary throughout the piece while the other two men weave in and out of the circle freely. They discuss vegetables, coffee and a mysterious "project," among other things, yet toward the end of the piece the topics are blended to a nearly incomprehensible jumble of jargon.

"It begins casually," said Eisenman. "But by the end, it just doesn't make much sense any more."

Only when the more aggressive of the conversationalist brings up the question "

What are you doing with your life?" do the remaining boxer-bearers gesture. At once, all hands are swept over the faces, and the men turn startlingly to face the audience.

"It all comes down to you," one of the men responds, and for a moment, the crowd may ponder exactly what their responsibilities in life entail.

The more abstract pieces may outweigh the headliner of the show, The Great Lalulá . Choreographed by Nusha Martynuk, the acting faculty advisor for Fall Forward , inspiration roots from a long chain of previous works.

Martynuk got her inspiration to choreograph Lalulá  from Coleman's orchestral composition of the same name. Originally based on a poem of the same name, his 1987 work was presented twice last year by the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble.

The first time I heard it, I thought, `This is a gorgeous piece,'" said Martynuk. "The second time I heard it, I said, `I gotta have it!'" Coleman's original program notes, based on the poem, were considered when Martynuk derived her choreography.

It is performed by the Oberlin Dance Company, comprised of seniors Allison Hales, Sarah Kupperberg, Erica Litke and Tanner Mullen; juniors Cara Perkins and Amy Beth Schneider and sophomore Anna Winthrop.

Two guest dancers also appear in the piece - Young Park (OC `91) and Deborah Vogel, adjunct instructor of dance.

Through its incarnations, the piece has found itself now in the medium of modern dance interpreted through the Oberlin Dance Company with guest dancers Young Park (OC `91) and Deborah Vogel, adjunct instructor of dance.

Though beautifully choreographed through more traditional stylized dance aspects and complicated figuring, the work was slightly longer than its predecessors, but failed to incorporate drastically new ideas into its context.

Musical dissonances layered over the soprano repetitions of "Lalulá" provided for intensity and climax, yet the piece as a whole seemed to lack something. Perhaps the abstractness of the preceding tap-dance number had audiences in a different mind set, but the featured work just wasn't as entertaining as some of the others. Nevertheless, it was an excellent work spotlighting the talent of its contenders against the difficulties of a demanding choreographic piece.

Fall Forward will be performed in Warner Main Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. Tickets are $2 OCID/child, $3 Faculty/Staff/Seniors & $4 Public. Tickets are $2 more at the door.


Photo:
We will not go silently into the night: ID4 is one of seven pieces being performed at this weekend's Fall Forward  Dance Concert. This concert is an opportunity for students and faculty to develop ideas through movement, be it traditional or not. (Photo by Peter Ment)


Oberlin

Copyright © 1996, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 125, Number 9; November 15, 1996

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