DANCE REVIEW

Choreographers kick-start dance space back to life : No-holds barred evening bristles with energy, fun
By Margaret Putnam
Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News


"The space once known as TOES sprang back to life Thursday night with a zing and a zowie. After months devoted to music and theater, the space (which is now the headquarters for Deep Ellum Opera Theatre, reverts to dance for a month, and it's holding nothing back.

Independent Choreographers' Coalition opened the month on a high note. The moods in a highly diverse Thursday night show ranged from pensive (Alex Spitzer in wheelchair earnestly looping about the floor) to tenderly romantic (Shanon Leyrer in spats and vest dancing with a clothes tree), with performance art loopiness thrown in for good measure.

The performance art piece -- Masks, by Kim Corbet, Kevin Hanlon, Amy Seltzer and Michelle Sherrill -- was amusing and screwy, featuring some wonderful video sequences of Dallas (a tangle of billboards and traffic signs), eerie vocalizing by Ms. Selzer and the kind of doggedly meaningful dialogue that never quite packs the punch it should.

There was no lack of punch in CoCo Loupe's Combat Comeback and Angela Sharp's To Be Charming in My Life.

The first was the raw, angry reaction to a husband's walking out on a wife. Ms. Loupe isn't one to twist a hanky and sigh; no, karate and body blows are more her style.

The dance opens with Ms. Loupe in a white gown, stading in near darkness, passively allowing a man to press his face to her leg, breast, neck. Is he kissing? Biting? Sniffing? In the next scene, she's wearing pants and boots and the mood has changed. They're enemies now: She pummels his chest. He kicks her in the neck. She hits him in the groin. The bites are for real; so is the anger. Finally, he leaves, and Ms. Loupe pounces and kicks and snarls, with an intensity that is exciting to watch.


To Be Charming is exciting too, but happy. The music swings (Benny Goodman and Elvis); the dancers are daring and bright; and the movement is freewheeling. The dancers, a wonderful crew mostly from SMU, tear around the stage, throw themselves into the air and then throw themselves on the ground before charging off again with the manic energy only the very young and resilient possess. Every once in a while they make an obscene gesture, but it's all in good fun. Think David Parsons embracing chaos and you get the idea.

Margaret Putnam writes about dance for The Dallas Morning News.