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No matter how lengthy this Montana lady lives within the Emerald City, the vivid abundance of spring right here amazes me yearly. Providing a equally effusive spring-like return, Guild Dance Company offered The Works2: Reconnected after a two-year hiatus. Offering three completely different lineups over three completely different performances, this system featured unique works by Guild firm members along with native visitor artists. The efficiency I’m reviewing (Saturday, April 26th 8 p.m.) featured a program as invigorating in selection and scope as strolling round Seattle within the springtime—greedily snorting up lilac fragrances and the visible ombre-ing spectacle of rhodie blooms.
The first piece, Words Cannot Express, is choreographed by Guild’s founder and creative director Alex Ung and Guild dancers. Gauzy material billows from a middle level on the ceiling and hangs into the dance house virtually the way in which Fourth-of-July swag festoons decks and balconies. The music creates an environment in some way each unsettling and ethereal. The dancers’ heads tick. They seem like they’re carrying heavy masses. They shake like they harm, and I hear lyrics from a Florence & the Machine track, “You need a big god…You keep me up at night.” Then a grand transformation begins—the material is pulled down like a giant tent. The dancers wrestle beneath, undressing. The material pulls away and one dancer is left in a climbing harness. She is hoisted to the ceiling the place she performs aerial acrobatic twists and spins. She is lowered down, the group takes her weight, the material wrapped, and so is the piece. It’s laborious to know for positive, however I ponder if the title of this piece, Words Cannot Express, references the stroke Ung miraculously survived in June 2023, having to be airlifted from the Olympic wilderness. In his seven-month restoration replace on his Go-Fund-Me web page, Ung works by aphasia to precise his gratitude to his household and mates for his or her help in his restoration from the life-changing incident. It is so good to see this member of the group again making dances.
The viewers will get an entire change of tempo as we observe the inside lives of dancers Megan Sellman and Ieva Bračiulytė in Post In Transit, a movie by David Comeaux. Developed throughout Open Flight’s Flight Deck residency and profitable the Best Duet award from the dancentric movie competition, Post In Transit explores a girlish fantasy world. Paper geodesic tents and hanging material divide an attic play house the place journal pages are written, crumpled like flowers and retrieved from the trash. Sellman and Bračiulytė lick envelopes, put them in bins, have a look at one another’s writing. We see a ravishing tawny-colored eye gazing by a gap. Fingers grasp, collect material. The duo lean on chairs, tip them. When the steadiness is upset, the dancers mirror and attempt to learn one another. Post In Transit is like peering right into a snow globe the place a fragile tug-of-war between self-love and who we turn into in relationship, all within the midst of a paper snowstorm.
No Take-backs choreographed by Guild member Hannah March, additionally hints at a private sifting by outer layers to seek out private identification. Three dancers kind laundry and placed on garments. They take off layers and step into another person’s costume. One begins to take her shirt off however doesn’t and performs a solo in a stark diagonal slice of sunshine throughout the stage. I hear phrases within the soundtrack that say one thing like, “I’m wonderful and I know there is a supreme power that is not going to Instagram.”
I’m virtually disoriented dance-style clever when the following piece by Ben White of Swing Dance SCT begins. Like a fizzing energetic blast of Coca Cola, three {couples} dance a enjoyable, bouncy quantity to massive band-sounding music. The {couples} take turns being featured, clapping their arms from the aspect whereas they watch the others dance. The footwork is typically tap-like and periodically punctuated with jazz arms. It feels just like the stress valve launch that joyous dancing offers, whether or not throughout conflict time of the previous or throughout the doom and gloom chaos that characterizes the information cycle of our present each day lives.
There is a clear starkness within the lighting, set, and costuming of In Three Parts choreographed by Guild member Shayley Timm that jogs my memory of the white-stuccoed partitions of Greek villages. The music says one thing about “When I sleep, I dream.” Three dancers carrying black create triangular formations below blue lighting that discover the push and pull of the power of that form. Their arms flutter to their heads and hearts like pressing prayers, symbology underscored for me by the holy trinity triangular formations. One dancer whips herself to the bottom. She dances in a wild, manic manner made all of the more practical when she shifts to sluggish movement, arms flat to the bottom.
After intermission, in one other refreshing model/temper change, Guild Company members Emma and Prasti Purdum dance their work all the pieces that was. Noah Gold performs keyboards on stage and performs his rearrangement of Patsy Cline’s Crazy together with unique track Let There Be You. The Purdums (a mom/daughter duo) emote to the sorrow and longing of Cline’s well-known track by squatting and rocking backwards and forwards whereas holding their faces. One covers her mouth, rubs her arms, and shakes her head like she disagrees with the opposite’s interpretation and embodiment of the lyrics’ sentiments.
Brass anklet bells tinkling, Indian classical and visitor dancer Pooja Ganesh breaks the Purdum’s disturbing spell. In an untitled piece, Ganesh stomps sophisticated foot rhythms, seems to be coyishly over her arms, and with elbows up, whirls and whirls impressively, her gown changing into a blue and crimson blur.
SLOWBURN Dance Company performs the following work. Like cameo portraits, the dancers maintain a sequence of poses, every carried out as if treasured and representing one thing of sentimental worth. Then the dance shifts. One dancer wears blue velveteen overalls and the opposite 5 put on all black. They create formations that remind me of 5 dots on a sport die. The soloist does a sequence of sluggish extensions, balances, strikes closely weighted to the bottom. Meanwhile, the 5 others sit within the lit a part of the stage after which depart just like the shake of fortune’s cube.
A second dance movie, Party Dress by Jeremy Steward, punctuates this system. Party Dress takes the viewers on a breezy romp by a rural setting. We comply with the dancers down a meadow path. We see arms clasped on forearms sliding and separating. The dancers toss their garments with abandon. Individual dancers smile into the solar in entrance of a barn. There’s a dinner scene that jogs my memory of the Slow Food Movement and I hear the phrases, “I don’t need it,” within the soundtrack.
The present ends because it started with a full Guild Company piece choreographed by Ung referred to as Am I Enough. Ocean wave imagery (just like the long-lasting prints created by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai) are painted on 4 rolling screens. The dancers stroll between the screens, transferring them to upbeat music, although their facial expressions stay indifferent in distinction. The dancers take the screens, or the screens take the dancers off stage and the night–that has been like a springtime sensory delight–ends.
This assessment is of Guild Dance Company’s The Works2: Reconnected Program carried out Saturday, April 26th 8 p.m. within the Yaw Theater. Other performances of The Works2: Reconnected have been on April twenty fifth, 2025 at 8pm and April twenty sixth, 2025 at 5 p.m. Guild firm dancers embrace Emma Purdum, Prasti Purdum, Shayley Timm, Kelli Carnes, Meredith Pellon, Kate Henderson, Kince de Vera, Hannah March, and director Alex Ung. See a duplicate of the night’s program right here.