Dance Review

Ezralow Dance makes East Coast debut with Open at NextMove at the Prince's spring opener.

By Merilyn Jackson

For the Inquirer

Hollywood was made for Daniel Ezralow. Talents like his don't come along often. Like Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse, he is one of those great American choreographers who worked in film and stage. Over the years, he has choreographed the Oscars, the Sochi Olympics, and Broadway's Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark, and he's never really settled down into his own company until now.

But it is Ezralow's expertise in multi-media showmanship (conceived and designed with his wife, Arabella Ezralow and Luca Parmigiani) and playful optical illusions that you have a unique American art form paralleled only by MOMIX (of which he was a founding member) and Pilobolus. His new Los Angeles-based company, Ezralow Dance, made its Philadelphia debut Wednesday night with Open at NextMove at the Prince's spring opener.

Episodic in structure, Open featured 15 sections performed by his nine dancers. Set to a classical music score ranging from Chopin to Bach, they changed in mood from romantic to serio-comedic.

Sliding screens served as backdrops for clever video projections or as blank walls to conceal or reveal dancers virtually shapeshifting behind them. The choreography sometimes got folded into all that chicanery. But then it was recovered as in a duet with a watery atmosphere where patrick Cook spun Chelsey Arce overhead in three revolutions as if she were a fish swirling in the sea.

In the Carmen section, Anthea Young's dropped head and outstretched arms showed her stunning musculature limned in warm lighting. As she lifted her head and hands up, though, we see that instead of castanets, she holds little dolls, Carmen and Don Jose, like hand puppets. The hilarity of seeing the puppet stab Carmen to death is then muted and the horror of the murder amplified when Young rises to her full height and dramatically pulls at her skirt as if it were a matador's cape, Escamillio's, Carmen's true object of desire.

This ability to pull at both the comic and tragic sides of the Janus mask in a millisecond makes Ezralow's dances spellbinding.

But in the section to Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, the "Dance of the Knights," the dancers shimmer as gods and goddesses in gold lamé and I longed to see him go deeper into the idea. I think this was the "Olympiads" section and he could make a full evening of them on Mount Olympus.

Ezralow Dance makes a fitting bookend to this 2016 NextMove series that closes with MOMIX in May and Hollywood is made better for artists like him.