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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > March > 09 > Entry
Review: Tapestry Dance Company’s ‘Head to Toe’
Tapestry Dance Company shows always exceed categories. Ranging from tap to modern dance to jazz, the company is, as artistic director Acia Gray describes it, a “multi-form company.”
Sunday’s “Head to Toe” performance at the Long Center marks the company’s first incursion into one of Austin’s newest dance spaces, and the packed audience got a little bit of all the forms and approaches Tapestry employs.
The show featured twenty different numbers, mainly choreographed by Gray and guest collaborator and local dancer and teacher Erica Santiago.
In solos, Gray and Santiago built portraits of individual personalities, and then later duets drew individuals together. In Jason Janas’s “Feeling Found,” Katelyn Thompson and Janas flirted with each other and Al Green’s music, looking like a pair finding the sweet spot of couple-dom where hips and shoulders sway in synchronous motion. Clarity and simplicity also guided dancer Matt Shields’ choreography for Tapestry’s newest (and welcome) additions, Siobhan Cook and Tony Merriwether.
Improvisation continues to birth some of Tapestry’s most eloquent work. In an improvisation to Gnarls Barkley’s “Searching,” Janas managed to grieve with his body, sending echoes of pain flying with every foot stomp.
As Janas painted an aural landscape of trauma, a single chair became the focus of his anger, until he crashed into it, overcome. In other solos, like Santiago’s “To Feel” for Thompson, chairs were less character and more prop. From television to modern dance, the emotive, often earnest or angsty “chair dance” is a well-traveled road. But the use of chairs as a recurring prop helped give the multi-faceted show a thru-line.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance dance critic.
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