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Out of the Frying Pan…
…and into the air-conditioned bliss of the Doug Fir for Ten Tiny
photo: Gordon Wilson
Last Sunday saw the 11th round of Ten Tiny Dances at the Doug Fir with a 5/5 split of choreographic muscle from Portland and Seattle sharing the bill. This go-round saw fewer dancers making work truly informed by the space or lack thereof–newcomers, especially, seemed to treat the spatial restriction as incidental rather than central–and a lot of talking. Someone said that if the good Lord had meant for dancers to talk, he would have made them poets.
Higher-lights included Daniel Addy’s “The Remainder and the Rest” in which an internally-illuminated, malfunctioning metronome was the perfect symbol of failure (we love failure) in a piece that involved a bust of Beethoven and a return to hours at the piano bench as a child, Mike Barber as tough-ass rollerblader in a perfectly charged stand-off with Jenn Gierada as a tough-ass badminton player, Tracy Broyles’ “The Sybil,” beautiful and magnetic in spite of Jung, and Amelia Reeber’s dance with a very long wig (we can’t wait to see what she’s up to next).
photo: Gordon Wilson
Daniel Addy and Beethoven. photo: Gordon Wilson
But the coup of the eve was “Contender.” Choreographed by Zoe Scofield, the piece was danced by none of the listed performers but a male dancer with more intensity in his five digits than was exhibited in the remaining 9/10ths of the eve. The juxtaposition of the Velvet Underground soundtrack, his body stenciled in the most delicate, lace-like patterns, and the coiled energy with which he approached movement was the gift of the evening.
Tracy Broyles. photo: Gordon Wilson
–Radon
All photos: Gordon Wilson.
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