Founder and artistic director Lora Allen’s evening-length performance, bloom, offers a movement driven piece motivated by David Ohle’s, Motorman. Using movement to explore narrative, the dancers exhibited both stability and vulnerability in their presence, sharing strength with one another while maintaining a sense of lightness in their bodies. The music, created by two-time Grammy winner Bob Lanzetti and Ross Pederson, firmly asserts the ambiance, creating cohesion and chaos alongside the dancers tactile motion.
Entering on the beautiful theater space of the Neighborhood House stands a black marley floor embraced by brick walls and the suggestion of an old gymnasium floor. Upon the marley sat a single dining room chair. The presence of this chair offered both the limitations and the potential energetic direction of a stagnant object. The lights lower and a languid duet begin between two dancers, the reunion of a partnership clearly familiar, their bodies trusting and vulnerable. The phrases are unpredictable, flexible from breath and transferred seamlessly from body to body.
The third dancer enters, formally introducing the chair as object and a force, and the trio becomes an energetic tornado of cause and effect. Blurring transition and step, the narrative created by sequence and reaction transcended any written plot. In the middle of this contact and interaction is where intimacy idled, granting space for the awareness of an unwritten plot to be acknowledged, made possible by the consistently authentic movement between the dancers.
The bodies are the priority in bloom, not as tools for aesthetic presentation, but as the sole content, creating a feeling of authenticity -the movement as language. Time stood still as the audience witnessed the contact and consequence within bloom.
[Christ Church Neighborhood House, 20 N. American Street] February 25-26, 2017; allendance.org