Barnard Dance Project at the Dance Theater Workshop
One day while visiting my girlfriend at Barnard, I happened upon a flier for this dance performance and said, “Why not? If I’m going to see dance, why not see some flexible amateur college girls? There won’t be any dudes at least.” So last Friday night at 6:30, I made my way down to 19th Street to catch the 7:30 show. My girlfriend nabbed me a discount ticket for half off so I saved about ten bucks (sweet deal considering my other dance options were 25+).
I really did not expect much from an amateur group of student dancers and I had no idea who any of the choreographers were, so I was ready to bail at intermission. Surprisingly, I found 4 separate dance pieces that were neither bad nor boring, in fact they were really freaking cool. One of the pieces, choreographed by Roseanne Spradlin included a bizarre trippy amalgamation of video clips, audio clips and unison miming. It was really crazy to see all the dancers act as one organism to expose this relationship between characters in the video clips. The video was from this 50’s film Peyton Place, which I am totally unfamiliar with.
My favorite piece was one that was performed to this heavily rhythmic and partially sampled Brazilian song. It included 12 women in flowing white dresses acting is jerky, almost spastic movements. They were divided into groups of different numbers (2,3 and 7 I believe). Out of nowhere one girl starts running around frantically like she’s playing duck duck goose and stops and goes backwards and then another girl follows. It was really this confusing and chaotic and made me want to isolate each group as they each did different movements that were purposely off to one another but kept the beat. It was difficult to keep my eyes from moving because you cold not focus. It was almost irritating. But nevertheless, it was better than seeing the Nutcracker fort he 45th time.