You know it when you experience a rare moment in theater. That’s how I felt Thursday as Infinite Movement Ever Evolving premiered Maurice Causey’s Grim Eye..
This is a jewel of a company with top-notch project-to-project dancers (including some borrowed from Houston Ballet and Complexions); it’s a treat to see them perform in an intimate space where you can watch their ribs rise and fall with their breathing and capture the nuances of facial expressions.
Grim Eye feels like the kind of ballet Ridley Scott would make if he created dance instead of movies. Maybe it was the fierce, angry, survivalist movement with jazz hands as claws — Alien. Or the strobe lighting and warrior paint on the eight riveting dancers — a little Blade Runner. Or Gabriel Prokofiev’s vinyl-meets-classical music. Probably all of the above.
Causey’s choreography shows William Forsythe influences (he was an early member of Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt company) without mimicry. Both grimy and gorgeous — and ablaze with sharp balletic touches — Grim Eye mixes electrifying solos, duets and small groupings with ensemble sections that have a dynamic, collective energy.
Grim Eye could hold up in a much larger space, where you might look down on the moving architecture — the kind of magic that happens when the four men are leaping and lunging more or less in place, and the women swiftly skip out in a wide swoop around them. If only I could hit replay and see the whole thing again.
Superfluous, by iMEE founders Spencer Gavin Hering and Andrea Dawn Shelley, opens the show on an entertaining note. Suave, sexy and just a tad loopy, it plays up the dark edges of ’50s songs by Harry Belafonte, Elvis Presley and Patsy Cline. It evokes a slightly dreamy bar, maybe in the Caribbean, where the air is full of boy-girl tension as the locals play poker, smoke and drink heavily. (A sculptural tree and an apple also suggest some Adam and Eve business.)
The fine dancers included tall, mesmerizing Britt Juleen Gonzalez (recently of Dresden SemperOper Ballet), Houston Ballet’s Jessica Collado and Oliver Halkowich, Edgar Anido of Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Lindsey McGill, Cristian Laverde Koenig, Shelley and Hering.
Don’t miss this one.
Infinite Movement Ever Evolving
The Houston dance company presents Grim Eye and Superfluous
8 Saturday-Aug. 27
Barnevelder Movement/Arts [1]
2201 Preston
$20-$25
713-426-3365 or www.infinitemoves.com [1]
Links:
[1] http://www.29-95.com/http