Margi Cole created her Dance COLEctive 16 years ago in part to support emerging artists, an enduring mission that includes the nurturing of new work.
To that end, a program over the weekend showed off original pieces by the young members of her troupe. Are these polished masterpieces ready to go on tour? No. But as a chamber exercise in choreographic exploration, the program, dubbed “COLEctive Notions” and on view at the Drucker Center, offered some intriguing moves by dance makers with something current and potent to say.
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One of the uneven elements of the program as a whole, however, was a kind of ongoing disconnect between form and theme. While the program notes revealed that the five works uniformly boasted provocative ideas, the pieces themselves often seemed remote from them. That’s the nature of abstract art, of course, and all these works are abstract.
But it seemed at times a shortcoming these dance makers might want to overcome. Some fared better than others, naturally. Molly Grimm-Leasure’s “Primary Blends” is a work inspired by the idea that different viewers of a work of art see it differently–the subjectivity of the aesthetic response, in other words. Her work for seven women–the largest piece on the bill–plays with that idea by offering a series of altering landscapes, the dancers forming various subgroups that evoke beings both in harmony and at odds on a kind of surreal plain, one punctuated by the ocean waves of Zak Leasure’s sound accompaniment.
Grimm-Leasure calls up some haunting, thoughtful pictures, the women sometimes in repose, witnesses at an exhibition while they’re at the same time part of it.
Cole and her troupe are devoted abstractionists, never content to just let loose and revel in a work’s score. Still, there’s some of that, and it’s enjoyable, in Shannon McGuire’s “Their There,” set to a couple of Hank Williams classics. Never solicitous or hammy, it manages an air of irony. More outright humor is part of the idea behind “Please read carefully,” Alaina Murray’s piece about our world besieged by instruction manuals, its three dancers in cartoon, maid-like costumes pertly interacting with each other to music by the Andrews Sisters and Tipsy.
“COLEctive Notions”
New works from the Dance COLEctive
When: 8 p.m. Saturday and 7 p.m. Sunday
Where: Drucker Center, 1535 N. Dayton St.
Price: $15; dancecolective.com