SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT
Dardi McGinley is a physically daring dancer. A tall woman with powerful legs, she seems to love to throw herself into movement, pitting herself against its difficulty. In Venus Envy, a dance for five women, the movements that repeat–a turning stag leap, a push-up in which a dancer throws herself to the floor, her feet straight up in the air, balances for a moment on her hands, then pushes herself back onto her feet–require a dancer’s sense of center and an athlete’s daring. But the signature movement in the dance is a reclining Venus pose–a woman lying on her side, propped up on her elbow, her head dropped to the side and her hair dangling. The dance doesn’t tell a story, but seems to describe a new femininity common in young women today that has many “masculine” characteristics: risk taking, aggression, and strength.
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Sanchez’s Chrysalis Frieze starts in an outlandish place, plays around a little, and ends in a not much different place–but the starting place is a wonderful place. The stars of the dance are four “long string sculptures” created by Bill Close of the performance group Mass: 20-foot metal sculptures that have brass wires strung along their length; running a hand along the wires gives a moaning or whining sound. The sculptures are arrayed on each side of Bill Wallace’s huge drum, and Close, Wallace, and members of the Jellyeye percussion group play the sculptures and drums while Sanchez and Julie Hopkins dance around and through the sculptures.
