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: “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: “Preparing to Orbit” by Big Plate Dance
Last Sunday afternoon I, along with a couple of dozen other audience members, found ourselves under the dim blue lights of the The .ZACK Theater walking together in a wide circle. Chairs were staggered in disjointed rows around us as we encircled the room, and above us a stage, empty and dark, loomed. Music coming from beyond the circle of chairs as walkers ebbed and flowed; electronic and atmospheric. We picked our way around the room, avoiding several large pillars that intersected the carpeted space, led in this peculiar game of orbit by five dancers in white jumpsuits who looked around at us with reassuring smiles. Eventually, chairs around the circle began to fill, a shift likely set off by one of the dancers, and the game became more akin to musical chairs. A slight tinge of anxiety was introduced: “Who would be the last one walking?” This group activity served as the opening of Preparing to Orbit, a dance performance presented by Big Plate Dance as part of the STL Fringe Festival on August 18th.
HQ Review: Space Station Dance Residency 2024
“I’ve heard of its beauty, and in some ways… it’s bizarreness too. Um and I felt it… And I felt it.” These words, spoken by Marlee Donniff in their solo work “I Drove Through West Virginia in the Dead of Night,” capture perfectly the essence of the performance series at which they were uttered. Space Station Dance Residency, co-directed by Jacob Henss and Robbie Van Nest, truly is no stranger to the bizarre and the beautiful. Now in its 5th year, Space Station serves as an incubator for St Louis artists to probe at their most experimental ideas, a gamble that has routinely laid host to some of the most unexpected and thought-provoking works of dance theatre in the St. Louis area.
HQ Review: “Alone Time” by Laura Roth
The soundscape of rain tumbles down from the vaulted ceiling above. Laura Roth sits alone on a chair facing the audience, clothed in dark sweat pants and a gray hoodie. Though the audience has just arrived to this place, Roth’s physical temperament feels as though she has been in this chair all day. The creative stimulus for this solo work, Alone Time, was originally born out of Roth’s experience of the pandemic. Though as time passed, it has broadened to capture how spending time alone has shaped her. With that in mind, this scene feels easily digestible as to what is causing Roth unease. As she sits, she begins to readjust herself, shuffling between different positions, emanating a mood of boredom and frustration. The outside world rumbles on while she is forced to confront this reality.
HQ REVIEW: “Styx and Stones” by Elinor Harrison in collaboration with Jorrell Lawyer-Jefferson
Styx and Stones, choreographed by Elinor Harrison in collaboration with Jorrell Lawyer-Jefferson, seeks to re-examine the concept of myth and look at it through a new lens. Why, if at all, do we choose to look back and revisit past stories? And not just these stories, but how they embed themselves in our lives and the ways we communicate our present existence. In this work, the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus is picked apart, unraveled, and examined through the framework of Harrison’s creative process. A variety of performance modes are employed and juxtaposed against each other. From physical theatre, to dramatic dialogue, to contemporary dance and the multitude of connotations that carries. These various mediums are constructively utilized to allow for a wide landscape of meanings to unearth themselves.
HQ REVIEW: Leverage Dance Theater presents “Of Matter, Mind + Spirit” at Holy Cross Lutheran Church
The third installment to a series of concerts for sacred space, Leverage Dance Theater’s Of Matter, Mind & Spirit takes audiences on a rabbithole-esque voyage down, out, in, around, up, and through seemingly every inch of the Holy Cross Lutheran Church. Consisting of six unique works by six different choreographers, the dancers of Leverage Dance Theater guide and coax their audience through a journey that both celebrates and questions ideas of spirituality and its place, both physically and ideologically, in our humanity.