Scope writer Barbara Melville offers her take on last weekend’s Winter Dance Concert.
Skidmore dance students in “A Gathering” (Photo by Steve Nealey)
The tribute to dance writer and arts advocate Mae Banner, who died last April, filled the Dance Theater for three performances, on Friday and Saturday nights and Saturday afternoon. Banner would have loved every move and moment of the richly varied program, which featured seven dance works presented by six dance department faculty choreographers working in an array of dance styles.
For starters, a troop of tunic-clad dancers leaped and fluttered across the stage in Isadora Duncan’s 1910 Valse Brillante, restaged by department chair Mary DiSanto-Rose and Duncan expert Jeanne Bresciani ’72. Aliza Reidt ’08 and new transfer Sara Miller-Hornick were especially eloquent in recreating the lithe, ingenuous Isadora spirit. Next up, the Copasetics Chair Dance featured six tap dancers, butts planted and feet flying, in a routine handed down from Harlem tap-dance greats, the Copasetics. When the Skidmore dancers finished, they picked up and folded their chairs, and walked off, clearing the stage for a memorable solo by guest student dancer Devin Johnson in The Phrase, a short, intense tap piece by Tina Fretto Baird. Johnson kept a cool poker face above staccato heels and toes, with live music from Skidmore dance accompanist/pianist Carl Landa and musical buddy Charlie Tokarz on clarinet.
In Debra Fernandez’s new work, Stitch (for my father), twelve dancers, men and women, stitch-stepped across the stage in patterns suggesting quilt squares. The weird and compelling music was credited to string quartet Ethel, and Jordan Taler ’07 created the handsome video backdrop; filmed in somber cream-and-black, it featured sewing machines and what appeared to be operating-room equipment, rhythmically pumping in tempos that matched the dancers’.
The new work most clearly dedicated to the Banner memory was Mary Harney’s A Gathering, performed to new music from Landa and inspired by “the spirit of klezmer music,” which Banner loved. Starting out with slow, mournful movements, the piece ended in gale-force klezmer, with ten dancers whirling to Landa’s catchy, bouncy tune, performed live on piano, clarinet, and accordion.
The program closed with a boldly sweet work by Debra Pigliavento, What a Wonderful World—all simplicity and smiling dancers—and Holberg Suite, a lushly beautiful ballet choreographed by Denise Warner Limoli to Edvard Grieg’s three-movement work. Corps dancers in pale peach, soloists in deeper apricot, and partnering pairs clad in russet made both elegant lines and eye-pleasing visual impact. Brendan Duggan ’10 danced like a flame.
“Over the past few years,” Mae Banner wrote appreciatively in 2006, “the Skidmore College dance program has become so rich and has branched out to so many dance forms that one…concert is not enough to hold them all.” She was right.
