Dancers pay 'Tribute' to life's nuances

Author: Oscar Loyo

Passion, energy, and even a happy birthday dance piece. This weekend, The Dance Company entranced audiences with its latest production, "Tribute." The hour long piece was directed by Professor of Dance Andrea Olsen and created by Jamie Gutierrez '07, Louisa Irving '07, Rebecca Marcus '07.5, Tatiana Virviescas Mendoza '07, Yina Ng '09, Simon Thomas-Train '09, Yong Zheng '07, Artist in Residence Tiffany Rhynard and collaborative choreographer Peter Schmitz. Through movement and multimedia, the company celebrated place and cultural renaissance, acknowledging all the essential things that are forgotten as we live life.

The opening piece entitled "This Place" was escorted by a film of birds flying freely and seemed to praise the stage. When the birds flew in through the screen, dancers reproduced the action vividly on stage. This interaction between film and dance was a recurring theme throughout the pieces.

One of the more unusual dances of the night was a solo by Train to a rendition of "Happy Birthday." The dark costumes done by designer Melody Eggen and the solemn lighting done by Technical Director of Dance Jennifer Ponder gave a gloomy and neglectful representation of an occasion regarded as colorful and immense in life. The dancer seemed to be fighting with his self in an effort to repress the event of another year gone.

The piece was immediately followed by a duo called "Partners," featuring Train and Irving which once again implemented the use of dark costuming in direct juxtaposition to something colorful - in this case a video of a elaborate sunset.

Pieces entitled "Men" and "Water" became representative of the individuality one finds within themselves and its similarity to nature. In "Men," Gutierrez, with Train and Zheng, produced portraits of liveliness and strength. Dancing in front of a screen showing mud and sand, the coarse nature of masculinity stood as a tribute to the connection with nature which man has forgotten due to modernization. By contrast, "Water" showed the female dancers in front of a screen of clear water and its natural flow, similar to the flow of dance. Virviescas and the women of the company gave femininity, free fluid form and curving movements to their dance and its representation of the connection between women and the life-giving force of water.

"Energy," with Rebecca Marcus and company, was another dance that connected clearly with the theme of Tribute. Rebecca became the embodiment of the energy created by a group of people playing cards on stage. Dancing alongside a screen of city cars speeding through, this dance became the vigor lost from life and its remarkable resiliency.

"Like clean air, clean water, it's easy to overlook what's essential. Dancing is a way of knowing old as the minerals that make up these bones, millions of years in the making," said Olsen.

With music by Philip Hamilton and Video by Jim Bruce, Tribute provided a ground for the essentials that are overlooked in the presence of a technological age. The dancers' ability to interpret the video and as well as the subjects of the video created a correlation with human kind's ability to imitate the apathy that technology brings. With titles such as "Men," "Partners" and "Loss," dance and film were a reminder to the audience about the things people lose sight of and must rediscover.