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ODC Scintillates With Variety
KT Niehoff’s You Wanna See My Heart? showed that her work translates well to the proscenium stage. Her company, LingoMotion, performed three showings of Inhabit, a piece that it worked on while in residency at Oberlin in Warner Main Space. The company works with non-proscenium spaces, moving in and out of the audience, requiring the audience to participate in the performance as they adjusted to accommodate the performers.
The schizophrenic Heart began with College sophomore Hannah Verill in the audience, delivering a monologue as she traveled down the aisle. The other dancers — College seniors Andrew Broaddus and Mara Poliak and College junior Lucy Segar — danced in a spotlight toward the edge of the stage, dressed in street clothes. Taking turns delivering separate monologues, the dancers illustrated abstract characters and their relationships to one another on stage. As the dancers struggled for their own characters’s identities, the piece struggled with its own. The stories were only loosely connected to each other, forming a disjointed plot tied loosely together with the movement. But its incomprehensible quality was part of its charm and seeing dancers speak while executing complicated movement phrases was engaging. The piece quoted the arc and material of Inhabit. The series of humorous stories started the concert off on a light note. The humor continued with Bianca Cabrera’s In That Skirt in which College seniors Beth Rogers and Elise Sipos, clad in cowgirl outfits with a bouncing petticoat, comically illustrated the tribulations of being in a relationship. “How Fucking Romantic” by the Magnetic Fields established the ironic illustration of love, relying entirely on the lyrics to establish the relationship between the two dancers before they acknowledged each other. The girls often repeated moments, as in one instance where Rogers kept being pushed away by Sipos, walking a few steps, turning to walk back again, only to be pushed away once more. The repetition in the movement enabled the audience to focus on the lyrics, which mocked the angst of love. This focus on the music was heightened by one section of the piece where the girls held up cards with the lyrics of the song written on them, flinging them to the ground after every line. The ensuing pieces were part of work that Holly Handman-Lopez developed for Victims of Innopportune Ardor, the first of Handman-Lopez’s three pieces. It began slowly with the girls — College junior Julia Daniels, College senior Emily Palmer, Poliak, Segar, Sipos and Verrill — dressed in long red dresses, looking much like the beginning of George Balanchine’s Serenade. Their introspective dance in unison was interrupted by the boys coming onto the stage and whisking several of the girls away. This piece also seemed to be about love and featured a stunningly executed tango done by Broaddus and Verrill. In the duet, the two oscillated between fighting and passion. The piece seemed unresolved when it ended. Handman-Lopez herself appeared on the stage in Turning Tale, which seemed to illustrate the wandering imagination of a page-turner during a piano concert. She used a wide variety of props, moving around the piano more than she actually danced. She moved around the stage with an almost childish curiosity — eating paper off a miniature stand, peeling a long score off of a larger music stand before wrapping herself up in it, shaking a giant black cord until pieces of paper floated down — all the while attentive to the task at hand: turning the pages of music. Assume the Mantle: Cocked illustrated the testosterone struggles of war through bodies of Emile Bokaer, OC ’05, Broaddus, College seniors Ethan Cowan, Michael Geraci and Scott Grogan and double-degree junior Ian Page. The boys wrestled artfully with each other, seeking comfort or sparring. Handman-Lopez tailored the choreography to the ability of her performers, who varied in their amount of training. Though the movement was at times simple, it was effective in conveying the message as in one moment where two of the boys supported each other’s necks as they bent backwards from the knees, forming a tabletop before they collapsed to the floor. The lighting was also extremely well-done in this piece. The pieces by Niehoff and Handman-Lopez were understudied by College sophomores Johanna Weaver and Jessica Barber, respectively. The Kindle dance concert was the best dance show that I’ve seen at Oberlin. But that might not mean much; as a sophomore, I haven’t been around for too long. | ![]() |
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