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Former BodyVox member Éowyn Emerald's third installment of Pacific Dance Makers, which in concept is a showcase of Northwest talent, is really more about Portland this year. Seven Portland choreographers joined one from Seattle on Friday's opening night for a show that included some real talent as well as some duds.
David Krebs
Another standout is Emeraldâs piece featuring Shaw and fellow BodyVox member Josh Murry. At its start, Shaw enters in front of a giant screen, while Murry appears, in silhouette, behind it. He emerges, bare-chested and with a mane of blond hair, to clutch Shaw, forming a tableau right off the cover of a Harlequin novel. The two then perform an intense duet, lifting each other in unorthodox waysâhe like a plank on her back, she in the fetal position like a boulder in his arms. As a howling Chemical Brothers track plays overhead, the screen behind them flickers like a gray Eye of Sauron.
David Krebs
A piece by Tracey Durbin also deserves note, if only for the self-evident work that went into it. A video by Janet McIntyre plays behind the action, but most of the time winds up upstaging it. In fact, these competing elements do more to weaken than to build the piece's direction. The enchanting multimedia presentation touches on the loss of a mother, with spoken word (âmemories can shrink like a bar of soapâ) and images (a woman walking on a beach; home movies of a wedding), but that idea never develops. Dancers gradually enter the stageâsix women, with the late addition of Northwest Dance Projectâs Franco Nietoâwhere they weave in and out of each other, occasionally connecting but often aimless. In the final movement, they all sit and watch a video of themselves in which they appear underwater, thrashing in slow-motion while wearing sheets of boldly colored fabric. Itâs pretty, but largely incoherent and self-indulgent.
David Krebs
Other parts of the program are even less impressive. Jim McGinnâs Float has been performed in town before and is now still just as muddy. Other pieces (namely Erica by Seattleâs Elia Mrak and Early by Samuel Hobbs) are directionless and tiresome in their minimalist abstraction. You wonât like everything, but that's the chance you take with a varied show like this.
GO: Pacific Dance Makers is at BodyVox Dance Center, 1201 NW 17th Ave. 7:30 pm Saturday, Jan. 11. $20. More information here.
WWeek 2015