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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > April > 26
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Review: Fusebox Fest starts off dancing with ‘Erection’ & ‘Bodies in Urban Spaces’
Dancers have a knack for reminding audiences that bodies have infinite possibilities.
In the opening weekend of the ten-day Fusebox Festival, “Erection” created by French duo Pierre Rigal & Aurélien Bory and performed by Rigal and “Bodies in Urban Spaces” by Austrian choreographer Will Dorner and a squad of local dancers, posed physical questions.
Rigal: Why stand on your feet instead of your shoulders?
Dorner: Why sit on a downtown bench when you could perch on it knees down, butt up?
On Thursday at Ballet Austin’s theatre Rigal morphed from amoeba to frog to biped to hologram as he slowly, deftly rose from lying on the floor to standing. He began on his back, his chest thrusting upwards, as though his heart filled his entire rib cage. On his upwardly mobile journey, Rigal writhed and rippled (he must excel at party game Twister). Simple, colorful projections—a series of white bars on the floor or expanding and shrinking squares of green, blue and red—framed Rigal’s motion.
Finally reaching standing, the projections subsumed his body. First, a strobe light effect (a direct steal from David Parson’s gimmicky, but famous 1982 solo “Caught”) made it look like Rigal could fly. Next a bare-chested, glowing projection of a man (imagine a cross between the Incredible Hulk and Michael Phelps) joined Rigal onstage. Rigal sometimes meshed with his projected partner, and other times left body parts outside the animation. The final effect: wiggling on the floor, the detail-oriented contortions looked more human than the standing man.
No environment could conceal the gymnastics of Dorner’s cast. “Bodies in Urban Space” is basically a contemporary art chase. An ensemble of colorfully clad dancers runs ahead of a walking audience, who encounter the performers in a variety of architectural crevices. During Saturday’s early evening show, the piece quickly transformed bystanders into audiences: bikers quieted their Harleys and rolled back several yards to stare at upside-dance dancers wrapped around a light post.
The intentional audience — those who assembled at Republic Park for the walk to the Capitol — seemed incredibly drawn to photograph every group of butts sticking out of building doorways or legs wrapped around gutter pipes. Bodies apparently don’t come into urban spaces without their iPhones anymore.
The Fusebox Festival continues through May 2. See www.fuseboxfestival.org.
Clare Croft is American-Statesman freelance dance critic.
