CELEBRATING ST. LOUIS’ VIBRANT DANCE COMMUNITY
St. Louis Dance HQ’s Blog is a compilation of writings and performance reviews from a variety of St. Louis based dance writers. If you’re interested in sharing your writing on our blog, please email stlouisdancehq@gmail.com.
HQ Review: RESILIENCE’s “Entry Points”
Dancers enter the stage slowly, house lights still up, softly taking the shape of cluttered furniture, discarding belongings in a scrap pile of junk one might find in a broom closet or unfinished basement. As the gentle strumming of the intro music fades into roaring chatter, the stage is prepared with a gentle fervor - a construction ladder is taken off stage right, a dry-mop swept across the floor - before the dancers and the music both climax into a melodic scream, relenting only out of shock of their own volume. This act of preparation serves as an eloquent metaphor for the meticulous groundwork and constant growth that has paved the way for Resilience Dance Company’s explosive entry into its fifth anniversary season. The 2024 edition of Entry Points, Resilience’s annual fall repertory concert, holds absolutely nothing back in its physicality, artistry, and production. Featuring five pieces, all by female choreographers, Entry Points is a thundurous, contemplative, and inspiring journey that digs into and showcases the undoubted range, power, and humanity of Resilience’s eight-person ensemble.
HQ Review: Leverage Dance Theater’s Nightmares and Dreamscapes
A haunted house turned immersive dance theater thrill ride, Leverage Dance Theater’s third installment of Nightmares and Dreamscapes serves as a fitting grand finale for both their 2024 production season and the Halloween season at large. Filled with classic horror tropes from ghoulish twins to haunted dolls (and ample screams), the production showcases what Leverage has become best known for - bringing meticulously crafted immersive dance experiences to unconventional spaces. Presented at 2715 Cherokee Street, a near blank slate of a building located steps away from The Luminary, Nightmares and Dreamscapes journeys the audience through every inch of the building’s chilling crevices.
HQ REVIEW: Saint Louis Dance Theatre opens its 24/25 Season with (RE)CLAIM
The opening visual is striking. Sergio Camacho in tasseled silver pants, crawls and undulates on the floor. Two others run in a circle, connected, yet seemingly lost. There is something just beyond their yearning fingertips. What is this world we have been dropped into? It reverberates with liminality. As though they are stuck between two worlds and are not sure how to escape. As this stark scene dissolves, a single dancer joins from the dark abyss upstage as another leaves. Sinewy textures build and collapse within their bodies as they build tableaus of relationships that dissipate just as quickly as they were formed. “Come…The Sun Doesn't Wait,” choreographed by Omar Román De Jesús, builds this world, then elongates its presence, allowing the viewer to mull over its internal atmosphere for the length of its duration. The reprise of this work in Saint Louis Dance Theatre’s concert “(RE)CLAIM”, Program B Matinee, set the stage for the ensuing journey that this concert of four male identifying choreographers had in store.
HQ Review: Saint Louis Ballet’s “Western Symphony,” “Serenade,” and “After The Rain”
Loose clusters of women stoically stand, arms outstretched diagonally above them. As the romantic swells of Peter Tchaikovsky’s music churn, the dancers’ arms softly ripple through space, and the dance commences with a harmonious simplicity that calls to life the spirit of George Balanchine. This opening tableau came to life when Balanchine first choreographed this work, “Serenade,” in 1934. During the rehearsal process, Balanchine saw the dancers blocking the sun out of their eyes, and he extracted this accidental encounter and utilized it as the opening gesture from which this choreography is born. That is just one of the ways Balanchine expanded how the form of ballet was created. He allowed the process itself to shape a work’s form. In addition, that form did not need anything outside of itself, be it narrative or preconceived context, to evoke emotion. This pioneering work continues to be an evocative piece that brings to life the beginnings of Balanchine’s career in America. It also makes one consider how the legacy of Balanchine continues to have a stronghold upon both the advances and limitations for how ballet exists within America.
HQ REVIEW: “Half Baked” presented by Big Plate Dance
Half Baked, produced by Big Plate Dance and performed at Greenfinch Theater & Dive, was a showcase of three works in progress by Abby LeBaube with e-Gos, Josiah Gundersen, and Erin Morris with Steve Davis. The evening was a stripped-down performance in a space akin to a black box theater with no curtain, simple lighting, and a few rows of chairs ascending on three sides of the stage. The performance pieces were distinct; ranging in texture, style, and content, and each was immediately followed by a Q+A with the artists. These artist talkbacks were facilitated by Big Plate Dance Artistic Director Tayler Kinner who followed Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process – a curated method of receiving and offering feedback to a work in progress.
HQ Review: “IN TWO” by Brendan Fernandes at The Pulitzer Arts Foundation
The Pulitzer Arts Foundation is a building that seems to emphasize its empty spaces; holding the weight of its own openness with thick concrete and large stretches of glass. It is an austere, contemplative space, with natural light fracturing and reflecting from a pool in the center of the building, sending wavy lines onto the gray ceilings, walls, and floors. The building was constructed in 2001 by Japanese architect Tadao Ando, known for his minimalist approach. I describe the space at some length here because it served as an important element and the context for In Two, a dance performance choreographed by Brendan Fernandes. In it, four dancers (Sergio Camacho, Xenia Mansour, Christopher Salango, and Carly Vanderheyden) responded to the most recent exhibit in a series of interweaving duets. But the dancers’ relationship to the building was just as remarkable as, and amplified by, their connection to the art and other bodies within the walls.
HQ Review: MADCO presents two weekends of “Bound” at The Luminary
MADCO in partnership with The Luminary presents its Spring Concert titled, “Bound,” April 19 & 20, and 26 & 27, 2024, 8pm. “Bound” features premiere choreography by Arianna Russ and CJ Burroughs.
HQ Review: WashU’s 2024 MFA Dance Concert
Washington University in St. Louis Performing Arts Department presents its 2024 MFA Thesis Concert.
HQ Review: “STORYSCAPES” by Karlovsky and Company Dance
In Karlovsky & Company Dance’s evening-length work, STORYSCAPES, the program posed the questions: “What are the stories and attitudes shared that get passed down through the generations? What stories do we want to continue to embrace? What stories should we re-evaluate? What stories should simply end?” If the stories we tell ourselves create the landscapes we live in, then investigating those stories for veracity, usefulness, and value becomes paramount.
HQ Review: “Picture Studies” presented by The Big Muddy Dance Company in collaboration with The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra
The Big Muddy Dance Company performed the work in partnership with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra. Retracing the origins of this work is a little like a spiral diagram of overlapping collaborations and inspirations: composer Adam Schoenberg was invited in 2013 by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City to compose work inspired by certain pieces of visual art. Thus the first iteration of Picture Studies was born. More than ten years later The Big Muddy Dance Company has been invited to respond in movement to Schoenberg's music, which the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra brought to stunning life. Artistic Director and choreographer Kirven Douthit-Boyd notes in the program that inspiration was taken from both Schoengerg’s score and some of the original works of visual art from which they originally sprang. The result was a stunningly successful melding of artistry and disciplines.
HQ Review: Cloven III SpaceStation Dance Residency Fundraiser
“Cloven III” is an evening-length work by Jacob Henss and Betsy Brandt. This duet, performed by both creators, is the third installment of an exploration of the rural relationship between farmer and bovine as a lens for personal reflection. The dairy cow is a site of industrialized sexuality and consumption, and the “Cloven” trilogy is an ode to this overlooked yet ubiquitous animal, symbol, and food source. This eccentric choreographic work lives at the intersections of experimental theater, contemporary dance, burlesque, and performance art. Its St. Louis debut will be followed by a series of performances throughout the Midwest this spring.
HQ Review: Saint Louis Ballet’s LOVEX3
Saint Louis Ballet’s production of Love X 3, which took place at the Kirkwood Performing Arts Center February 16-18, 2024, featured three pieces of varying styles of ballet, created by three different choreographers. The performances in this show clearly displayed how versatile ballet can be and gave everyone in the audience something to appreciate about ballet, no matter what their personal preferences may be.
HQ Review: MADCO’s Dare to Dance - Saturday
The lights flicker off as Kayla Montgomery takes the stage of COCA’s Berges Theatre. At just 14 years old, Kayla had been chosen to perform a solo she created as part of MADCO’s Emerging Student Choreographer Program, in partnership with St. Louis Academy of Dance (SLAD). As the music swells, Kayla emanates a poise and assuredness about her presence on stage. She effortlessly oscillates between multiple movement qualities within a single phrase, capturing the range of a leg extension that then melts to the ground and allows the weight of the floor to sink into her hips and torsos. She uses her spine to punctuate the subtle riffs of Otis Redding’s Try a Little Tenderness, before gliding over the stage with a turn that fills the entire room. Her intuitive musicality and ability to seamlessly transition from one style of movement to the next made Kayla’s performance one of the most striking of the evening, and perhaps most evident of what MADCO’s Dare To Dance Festival is all about. A festival, led by Artistic Director Arianna Russ, to showcase the immense amount of innovation and collaboration that exists in the St. Louis community and beyond.
HQ Review: MADCO’s Dare to Dance - Friday
MADCO presented the first performance of the dance festival, Dare to Dance, on Friday, January 19th. The evening was the first of two performances as part of the festival and featured 13 dance pieces from various independent choreographers and dance companies in St. Louis and beyond. When writing about large performances, the prevailing challenge becomes discerning which pieces to mention. One option is to write in detail about every piece, though the risk is to belabor the task, another is to choose dance works at random, and the very worst option is to write about the dances which are personally most enjoyable to the writer. In lieu of these unsatisfactory options, the pieces mentioned here are those which for various reasons stood out as singular from the rest of the program. The night was full of talented artists and interesting choreographic viewpoints and any who are left absent here should not be viewed as a statement of merit but of the necessity of brevity.
HQ Review: The Big Muddy Dance Company’s EVOLUTION: Program A
EVOLUTION continued The Big Muddy Dance Company’s season at the Catherine B. Berges Theatre on January 11-14, 2024. This winter concert featured three different programs with a mixture of both familiar pieces and world premieres. This review in particular will focus on the pieces in Program A, which the company performed on Friday, January 12.
HQ Review: The Big Muddy Dance Company’s premiere of “New Ritual” by Sidra Bell
A “boutique hybrid brand of prolific movement illustrators,” is how Sidra Bell of Sidra Bell Dance New York self-describes the work she creates. With this in mind, her world premiere of “New Ritual” performed by The Big Muddy Dance Company, brought to St. Louis Bell’s distinct flair for utilizing dance as way to convey the hybrid nature of our bodies. Both as individual bodies, and as collective units, moving about in this contemporary world.
HQ Review: The Big Muddy Dance Company’s “Awakening” (Program B)
At the opening of Awakening, the newest production by The Big Muddy Dance Company, the curtain opened to a dark stage and the sound of drums. The lights came up on two dancers dressed in blue suits, backs to us, in a street lamp-like glow. Separated from us by a screen, the dancers appeared slightly hazy. Jazz music played as the first dancer began to move: rolling shoulders emanated out into fluid, full-body unfurling. He made contact with his partner and she too came to life with sliding stretches and turns. They walked towards the audience as the screen rose and the light changed to a stark white, exposing the stage wall behind them. Eventually, the full company of 14 worked their way onto stage. Like the jazz music which inspired it, the movement in Something About a Dream, choreographed by Kirven Douthit-Boyd, was at once bouncy and taught, fluid and sculptural, playful and longing. The piece moved, ebbed, flowed, and filled the stage to the brim with color and sound. It ended as it began: two dancers facing back, silhouettes softened by the screen. As music and lights faded they continued to move. The dance, one supposes, went on without us.
HQ Review: The Big Muddy Dance Company’s “Awakening” (Program A)
On November 2 and continuing through November 5, The Big Muddy Dance Company delighted audiences at its fall concert, Awakening, at the Catherine B. Berges Theatre at Center of Creative Arts. Awakening featured Program A on November 2 and 3, and Program B for both the matinee and the evening performances on November 4. This is a review for Program A, which included two pieces that premiered in The Big Muddy’s spring performance last May and a new premiere that evening.
HQ Review: Ballet 314’s “Fall Fête: Twisted Tales”
St. Louis dance companies have packed this month’s calendar with their first shows of the 2023-2024 dance season. The most recent company to present their opening performance is Ballet 314 with Fall Fête: Twisted Tales, held on Saturday, October 21 in the Strauss Blackbox Theater at the Kirkwood Performing Arts Centre. Now in its second year, Fall Fête was a mixed bill show that featured three separate works performed in an intimate setting, as well as a fundraising event for the company. This review will cover the evening performance, which included an elegant pre-show cocktail hour and post-show reception, as well as brief talks from company directors Rachel Bodi and Robert Poe. Fall Fête celebrated Ballet 314’s growth as a company and took the audiences’ breath away with gorgeous dancing and engaging stories behind the pieces performed.
HQ Review: A Synopsis of St. Louis Ballet’s “Giselle”
Saint Louis Ballet opened their 2023-2024 season with Giselle at the Blanche M. Touhill Performing Arts Center on the campus of University of Missouri-St. Louis. This haunting full-length ballet featured live music from the Chamber Music Society of Saint Louis, continuing a new tradition of excellence for the company.