As Moving Current Dance Collective moves into a new era with veteran troupe member Brian Dean Fidalgo II now sharing artistic director duties with founder Cynthia Hennessy, the company is showing itself to be in fine form in an enthralling program at HCC-Ybor, to be repeated tonight and Sunday afternoon.
Pieces by Hennessy and Fidalgo bracket the program of four group dances and two solos. In Hennessy’s opener, All Day, Every Day, prison chants accompany a scrum of dancers in work clothes — a white lab coat, a chef’s uniform, a sharply tailored tux jacket. Individuals and couples gradually peel off from the group, striving, laboring on. As the music evolves into a haunting contemporary score by Devin Rice, the movement shifts as well, and the group comes back together as some members fall but others are rescued. It’s a potent visual metaphor for the burdens of workaday routine and the crucial importance of mutual support.
The evening’s closer, Fidalgo’s I Was Thinking…, also finds a path from self-involvement to mutuality, albeit with more humorous intent. The dancers at first are lost in their own worlds, wandering about and talking aloud to themselves in intriguing contrapuntal rhythms — we hear snatches of what sound like plans for the day and other interior monologues. Later, even as they begin to move in unison, individuals slip out of line and have to be pullled back in. Purposeful runs across the stage stop suddenly; a dancer pulls up and looks askance, as if hearing or smelling something indefinable. A whimsical and very danceable score — Prima Donna by the French composer René Aubry and the Gypsy accordion sounds of the band DeVotchKa — adds to the lighthearted mood.
The music that powers Christina Acosta’s Transmission is all bleeps and static, with barely audible, slightly ominous voices threaded through it. In a talkback after the performance, Acosta talked about being inspired by fractals, and about having challenged the dancers — Marion Baldeon, Aly Coscia, Melissa Torres and Fidalgo — to abandon their comfort zones for movement they weren’t used to doing. They rose to the challenge. Arms outstretched, palms flattened, they appear to be taking flight at first, and very soon you stop thinking of them as human entities and more as parts of an imploding machine, traversing the stage in rhythms both swirly and spasmodic. (Maybe it was that lab coat in the first piece, but I kept thinking of the jagged pulse patterns of an EKG.) Here, too, the dancers reassemble at the end, headed somewhere together.
Two powerful solos suggested differing varieties of quest. In the stunning opening image of Sadie Lehmker’s Delineate, we see Baldeon in a square of light, her back to us and her legs concealed by a skirt so that she seems to be rising out of the floor, assuming a new form as we watch. In a motif that carries through the dance (to the cello piece “Flying and Flocking” by Zoe Keating), she inscribes filigreed patterns with her beautifully expressive fingers on her arm and then in the space around her. It's as if she's trying to define, and maybe defy, her limitations, to escape that confining block of light.
Conversely, Alex Jones’s lyrical, anguished solo Into the Light, as its title suggests, strives overtly to go toward the light. Moving to gorgeously over-the-top music by Max Richter, Jones shows great emotional and physical range — embracing himself in what could either be self-love or entrapment, reaching up, up, up to reach what seems to be unattainable, circling one arm as if bringing someone/something into his protection.
But the piece which may have made the most impact, in all senses of the word, was after the fracture, by guest choreographer Bradley Michaud of L.A.-based METHOD Contemporary Dance Company. It was danced fearlessly on Friday by Aly Coscia and Melissa Torres; Fidalgo and Sean McDonald will perform on Saturday, and Coscia and Torres will repeat on Sunday. You can see why the same team could not possibly dance this piece two days in a row. Taking off from martial arts moves and fight choreography, it’s more duel than duet. The two dancers grapple for supremacy, dropping into an occasional, almost tender lull, then up again until one slaps the other away or slams her to the floor. Sisters? Lovers? Mother and daughter? Whichever you choose, it’s a visceral evocation of eternal power struggles, and the dancers are in it for real — McDonald told the talkback audience that he has a bruise the size of a planet on his thigh, which makes perfect sense.
It would be interesting to see how the dynamic shifts when the dance is performed by two men. But I can’t imagine it being done with any more courage or concentration than seen here with Coscia and Torres. With only their breath as soundtrack, they rivet our attention from the first moment. And a word about Celeste Silsby’s lighting; here and throughout, it contours the dancers’ bodies and establishes moods with specificity and style.
Kudos to Moving Current — the new era is off to a great start.
Moving Current Dance Collective at HCC Ybor Performing Arts Building, MainStage Theatre, corner of E. Palm Ave. and N. 14th Street (Avenida Republica de Cuba). Sat., Feb. 21, at 7:30 p.m.; Sun., Feb. 22 ,at 3 p.m. Tickets: $16 Adult, $12 Seniors (60+ with ID)/Students (with ID). 813-237-0216, moving current.com.
