If dance is a language, it is spoken in a variety of accents. A performance of the Pennsylvania Ballet often bears few similarities with the post-modern choreography of contemporary movement art. FringeArts attempts to bridge this divide with WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT OUTER SPACE, commissioning three contemporary choreographers—Zoe Scofield, Georg Reischl, and Itamar Serussi—to create pieces on PA Ballet dancers. At times, the collaborations work wonders: “Wow,” the choreographers seem to be saying, “I’ve got these amazing ballet dancers to play with.”
Serussi’s piece, “Operations”, is the most successful of the three, all of which are accompanied by the stirring live music of Ensemble39. Serussi doesn’t try to break up the balletic grace with as much of the formalized unnatural movement I’ll call alien hand syndrome (to use the academic term) which contemporary dance (including all three of these works) can fall prey to. Instead, his four dancers (three men wearing amazingly colorful flowered trousers playing off an athletically dressed lipstick-adorned woman) revel in the playfulness of the music and choreography while retaining the athletic finesse of their training. [FringeArts, 140 N. Columbus Boulevard] September 6-7, 2014; fringearts.com/event/what-i-learned-about-outer-space.
This is a review? Please, after seeing the performance I believe that the dancers were professional and lovely to watch. The musicians were beautifully trained and presented some interesting musical ideas. However, much of the choreography I thought was inept, uninspired, uninteresting, and not nearly challenging enough for these dancers and musicians!