By Dezmond Remington
Dance Visions can’t be summed up in a few simple opening sentences.
The concert can’t be judged as a whole because of the six students and three faculty that choreographed 10 different dances, all performed by dancers from Humboldt’s dance department. Each dance had its own different look. There were fairy tales, night clubs, and cabaret halls all on stage, as well as a few more archetypal modern dance pieces.
It was a celebration of aesthetics. Though none of the costumes or lighting was overly elaborate, it was all rich. No dance was boring to watch. All of the dances were a thrill to watch as performers contorted and flipped, swayed and leaped. Broken Boundaries, a dance choreographed by professor Linda Maxwell and performed by just three dancers, looked like a moving painting.
Though the pieces by the professors were perfectly, reasonably interesting, the most entertaining and daring performances came courtesy of the student choreographers. Alli Bush’s 8te was a neo-burlesque extravaganza. Miriam Allen’s Evocative Pigment juxtaposed three different colors in a dazzling display of light and motion that was wholly captivating.
The one criticism that could be thrown at Dance Visions is that art usually has some kind of meaning, a meaning that many of the dances seemed to lack. What significance or idea they expressed wasn’t easy to pick up on, though I’m no professional art critic.
But how much does that even matter? Dance Visions was a beautiful spectacle, a fun look into the minds of Cal Poly Humboldt’s dance auteurs and performers. Meanings or messages can be overrated when it comes to critiquing art, especially at a college level when people are just learning how to express themselves. It was joyous, a delight to the senses. That in itself is a meaning.
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