Each week in August, TBA:09 Artistic Director Cathy Edwards will zero in on different artists and projects coming to the Time-Based Art Festival September 3-13. This is the final post of the series.
The TBA Festival this year features not-to-be-missed new dance, including two pieces by Pacific Northwest choreographer Amy O’Neal. TBA audiences are probably very familiar with Amy for her work as a dancer in Reggie Watts’ TBA:07 piece, Disinformation. Don’t miss the potent force of her own choreography!
The first of Amy’s works, crushed (September 7-8), is made in collaboration with musician Zeke Keeble and their company locust. Following that, Amy will present the world premiere of a small-scale and large-ambition duet, too, made under the name of AMYO/tinyrage (September 10-12). Both of these dances will be performed at Washington High School, home of the WORKS as well as a gorgeous old-world auditorium right at the center of the building.
What I love about locust’s crushed is the visceral intensity of the all-out dancing, a mixture of club, break and urban dance styles set to a ferocious electronic and beat-box sound-score. This piece is all about impact, and it literally crackles and pops with its beautiful, urgent, almost-fevered kinetic style. If you love urban culture and full-out dance, it is definitely the piece for you!
After you take in crushed, don’t miss too, a debut work that brings Amy and longtime dance partner Ellie Sandstrom into contact with a host of strangers, friends and acquaintances (including Reggie Watts) in a video landscape that features lots of observations drawn from Amy’s recent travels through Japan and the US.
Watch an interview with Amy O’Neal on PICA’s YouTube channel.
Photo: Rosa Frank
Closing this year’s festival is the gorgeous and evocative dance piece Boléro Variations, by the world-renowned German choreographer Raimund Hoghe. This piece will be at the Newmark Theater for the last two nights of the Festival, and I hope you will join me there for this not-to-be-missed experience! Boléro Variations is danced by a company of five men and one woman to a score composed entirely of different versions of the classic Argentine musical form of the boléro. Raimund Hoghe brilliantly mixes musical references from the beloved Ravel, the humor of television analysts commenting on Torville and Dean’s Olympic ice-dance routine, and nostalgic snippets of swing chanteuse Eydie Gormé. The dance itself seems to reflect the endless possibilities of human gesture and movement, and the spirit of the piece is ritualistic, sublime and eternal. It is really a masterpiece of specific, thoughtful bodies in motion, and although it has been seen around the world, the TBA performances mark the U.S. debut, after which it will go on to Minneapolis and New York City.
Watch snippets of Boléro Variations from 2008’s Festival TransAmériques:
