In the curtain speech, producer Marlo Martin tells the story of how BOOST Dance Festival began. A number of many years in the past and new to the town, Martin needed to make work, however after a collection of rejections, determined to make her personal alternatives. Inviting her mentors locally to current work alongside herself, she discovered a recipe that helped her and different rising artists get a foothold within the Seattle scene. Now Martin is a mentor, and this marks the tenth (non-consecutive) season of BOOST dance pageant. With seven works introduced in a night, it may be a superb option to get your finger on the heartbeat of what’s taking place. BOOST 2025 didn’t fail to ship on a collection of thrilling and significant works that launched me to artists I hadn’t seen, and received me excited concerning the present state of dance artists making in Seattle.
Sean O’Bryan’s Find me within the shallows is a witchy begin to the night. Lights pop onto 5 dancers (Carol Davis, Eva Crystal, Hayley Keller, Madison Mayfield, Roni Witbeck) executing speedy percussive gestures in time to sharp percussive beats. With hair flying and lengthy black skirts swirling, one dancer emerges from the maelstrom, and with a dramatic gesture appears to conjure the others right into a cascade of phrasework. High legs, arched spines, sweeps of the arms. What I discover straight away is how in sync these dancers are. Uniformity isn’t all the time the perfect, however it may be particular to see and tough to realize. The angle of each arm, the timing of each leap, the exactitude to which these dancers launch their spines, all completely rehearsed. The ensemble unity gives the look that that is all one particular person, their fiery inside expertise made seen by means of these 5 our bodies. As the music shifts to emotional strings, there’s a continued theme of 1 dancer diverging from the group, and returning to be embraced or rejected. I’m solely taken out by the dancers’ occasional seems to the viewers. Who are we in all this? What does it imply for the dancer to see us versus asking us to lean into their internally developed world?
As if to reply my query, Maisy Neill’s Tether presents an entrancing duet between Amanda Winterbauer and Sydney Ngyuen who’re, fairly actually, wrapped up in one another. Nguyen, like a panther able to pounce, hovers above a languid Winterbauer, who sits like a mermaid on the ground. Between them a large flat band ties their two facilities collectively. Nguyen ripples with a form of threatening aliveness, haunches drawn and highly effective. It’s onerous to take my eyes off her, however once I do, the preliminary delicacy of Winterbauer belies a powerful and exacting dancer. The two of them face off, wrapping and unwrapping one another in a whirlwind of energy and negotiation. Athletic motion—crawling and pushing—is peppered with articulate muscular isolations and speedy rhythmic hits that means membership dance affect. Both dancers and choreographer are popping out of the UW dance division, and their abilities right here converse extremely of that program.
Another ensemble work, Collective Echo, by Sam Fabrikant, options six dancers in muted pinstripe pajamas. Like O’Bryan’s work, it performs with one dancer on the surface. An preliminary tableau, posing cooly as if for a trend journal, is interrupted as Victoria Perez scootches in, sidestepping with their butt humorously towards the viewers. But the minute she arrives the tableau dissolves. This theme repeats all through; from summary dance phrases, lady gang tableaus coalesce and break aside, with a second of theatrical humor interrupting the in any other case severe piece. Most of the time the dancers appear to be creating an architectural panorama wherein duets and small teams break into gooey sluggish movement physique puzzles, entwined in each other and consistently reworking. It has the power of individuals invested in a gaggle venture, particularly when the entire group creates a mountain with their our bodies, taking turns serving to Carol Davis to stroll throughout the ever-moving panorama of backs and shoulders. They appear to be looking out, however for what? The unpredictability of this piece stored me looking out too, however in a great way.
Continuing the thriller is maia melene d’urfé’s endlessly circling, your thoughts finds out. Crossing the stage, they drag a material stuffed with glittering rocks that spill out behind them, leaving a thick, sharp-looking slug path. From stillness, d’urfé immediately and unexpectedly falls, catching themself on the glittering gravel. This begins an embodied and affected person exploration of increasing time an undercutting expectation. Moments sluggish and suspended interrupted with a fast shifts, disjointed isolations—arm, eyes, ribs, foot—I by no means knew when or the place they’d transfer subsequent. In one significantly thrilling second d’urfé walks on their fingers as their toes drag behind them with eerie smoothness. In one other, they reveal spectacular flexibility in a twisty thrash dance of switching limbs. They hit the rock pile and the gems scatter noisily. After some time their physique appears much less in management, as if influenced by an outdoor drive, spinning them throughout their again. They rise to drag from off stage an outsized black blazer studded with the shining rocks. Bathed in intimate lighting by Becca Blackwell, d’urfé glimmers like a human disco ball. Walking backwards they shut their eyes, palms open.
While the primary half of the present tended towards heart-pounding depth, the second half of this system pulls our hearts in several methods. Gabrielle Nomura Gainor’ transferring work Kintsugi responds to the Hiroshima bombing. An intergenerational forged of ten deliver on glowing paper lanterns and group behind veteran Seattle dancer Fumi Murakami, fanning outward like a household tree. Audio interviews with survivors of the Hiroshima bomb and its aftermath weave out and in of music by Kishi Bashi because the group takes proud, certain steps ahead. Then the group flood previous Murakami like a river, caught within the eddies of the motion. Each particular person appears to grow to be a pillar in a monument, a tree in a forest, whereas people and duets momentarily spring to motion like a snapshot of reminiscence. The moments that stick with me are these grounded in picture—I keep in mind somebody transferring as if hanging photos on a wall—after which Kaylyn Ready, who attracts her fingers down out of the sky with fast angular pulls as if describing lightning. While grounded in a narrative of nice loss, this work tells a narrative of resilience. When Murakami duets with Ready, who’s her younger grownup daughter, the ancestral continuity is a part of this work too. The bombing of Hiroshima is all the time value remembering, and feels extra related than ever, given this week’s escalation of US bombs used on the civilian populations in Gaza. “If we forget that history, that history will repeat again,” says one of many interviewees. When the dancers look out to the viewers, I do know why.
Natalie Grant’s solo Beginning(s) takes a extra private and theatrical flip. Sitting earlier than a projection on the again wall, Grant watches clips of dancers casually noodling in several dance studios. Gradually she begins to imitate the on-screen actions, taking up every particular person’s physicalities and idiosyncrasies, pulling her from her chair with bigger and bigger motion. Abruptly the music cuts and the work lights pop on—Grant freezes as if caught—“Do I need to start over?” she asks in direction of to the tech sales space. She performs it dramatically, so there’s no approach anybody thinks that is truly a tech combine up and never deliberate, and at first I’m postpone by this gimmick. But then Grant commits to a stammering monologue of questions that leans into an nervousness ridden physicality of pressure and fidgeting. “Did any of this count?” she asks. It turns into obvious that she is asking about one thing a lot larger than this explicit piece, a satisfying transformation from one that means to a different. “How far back do I have to go?” she says as she strips again heat up sweats to disclose tights and a leotard, touching her head along with her fingertips like a 4 yr previous imitating ballet. Grant, who relocated to Seattle only some years in the past, seems to be speaking about her profession, and what it takes (and what you unfastened) when beginning over in a brand new metropolis.
The last work on this system is from Martin and her firm badmarmarDANCE. We Meet Again is hard-hitting, full bodied ensemble work of stage-traversing motion, an excerpt of their current night size work, VESSEL. This publication already reviewed the work, I gained’t re-review it right here, besides to level out a particular side of this explicit efficiency. Attending on closing evening, the dancers exuded a playfulness and heat I didn’t keep in mind from the unique present, each other with loving smiles and genuine connections. It was clear that this was the final time they’d do that piece collectively and the dancers had been celebrating one another from the within, and letting us be witness. There love for each other was palpable—typically it’s extra than simply the deliberate choreography that makes for a transferring efficiency.
Boost Dance Festival ran March 14-16 at NOD Theater.