Zoe/Juniper

Last night I saw Zoe/Juniper at The Dance Center of Columbia College.  65 minutes of dark, strange and intriguing visuals.  My husband didn't care for it, but he's no dancer, so I pulled rank on him and told him although he's normally free to have his own opinion, he'll have to agree with me on this one.

Were there lulls in the action? Yes.  Especially during the quiet moments when we could all hear percussion practice going on in the Sherwood Music School next door.  Someone should really make sure that on performance nights, no one practices the drums after 8pm.  Seriously.

There were also some Greek-chorus/baroque court dancing sections that went on a bit long with unending repetition.  This is where I would have cut at least 2 minutes off the end of each "chorus" section.

Some other comments I got from fellow patrons were that the scenes seemed disjointed and the piece was not cohesive.  I didn't mind the separate "scenes".  It felt like wandering through a gallery and looking at the individual pieces in a visual art show.  My only beef was that I wanted more of the fantastic video that appeared in the first third of the show.  Ghostly mirrored video images haunted each of the dancers as they appeared and disappeared from the stage.  The human-sized images danced as much as the real dancers and I wanted more.  I rarely feel such a connection from video in dance.

The vocabulary of the piece was low, feral, and glitchy.  You felt like you were watching a grainy video feed that intermittently skipped frames.  It was technically very difficult and quite unique.   Yes, legs went up to the ceiling and toes pointed (you should know that these things are loath to me), but all for the sake of attaining the praying-mantis/scorpion/gollum feel of the movement.  The dancers all embodied this so well, and then Zoe entered the scene and blew them all away.  Insect-dancing is clearly her specialty.  Entirely made of long limbs that are evidently able to rotate at least 270 degrees (yes, I had to look up the rotation of an owl's neck to get an accurate figure), Zoe is able to go anywhere and stop momentum to change direction at breakneck speed.

Did I mention the shiny floor that made each dancer look like they were avatars because of the light that seemingly shone up on them from the floor?  It's hard to describe, but it looked like a very specific follow-spot on each dancer... coming from underneath the floor.  Cool.  Cool, cool, cool.  Besides that, it made their footsteps sound completely different from any regular dance floor.

To wrap it all up, despite some quibbles on the editing, a desire for more of Juniper, and the drummers next door, I thoroughly enjoyed the collaboration of Zoe/Juniper.

I'd see them again.  For sure.