Star Star Star

Two trios lit up the tiny stage at the Works among the Ten Tiny Dances at PICA’s TBA Festival: Hot Little Hands’ Didactic Identity and Lucy Yim’s Vuelto from a Future Dance. These are younger groups to keep an eye on, like Portland’s Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner.

We are particularly interested in Lucy Yim’s work; prior to coming to Portland, she did a collaborative piece based on the way bees communicate through dance (!). From what we’ve seen so far (including a piece at the recent Richard Foreman Festival at Performanceworks Northwest) she incorporates brief tableau, beautiful movement that is dancerly, but not too (as danced by Yim, Jen Camou, and Sara Naegelin), and plays with spinning dancers in and out of unison. That’s a bit reductionist, but we’re eager to see more of these dancers’ work. Yim will be performing in City Dance with Cydney Wilkes.

Hot Little Hands, directed by choreographer Suniti Dernovsek and visual artist David Stein, have employed a high theatricality (costume, set, prop) in works like Lawn of the Limp and Avian Fable. For TBA, dancers Kerry Ratza, Erin Seaman, and Jesicca Burton with cardboard box blockheads and tough-guy arms ending in fists flat-footedly trudged through a mechanical choreography that was more winning than that description suggests.