By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Dance taps the emotional core of performers in a way no other performing art form does.
That’s on display at the Winter Dance Concert at Bowling Green State University. The Dance Program performance will be Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. each night in the Donnell Theater in the Wolfe Center for the Arts.
The dancers’ bodies move to melodies and words, in a way that brings the emotions to the surface. That the songs so often delve into issues pertinent to the dancers’ lives gives many of the pieces an almost confessional feel.
They are not afraid to address darkness — “Mortality Paradox” choreographed by Tracy Wilson springs from a graveyard. But even that dance is infused with elements of humor and hope. And nothing expresses exuberance of life than a good tap routine as demonstrated in “Don’t Give Up” choreographed by Colleen Murphy.
It’s not just the young who express their emotions.
Tammy Metz Starr will bring two of the participants in her Dancing with Parkinson’s class. The dance is introduced by a short video in which Larry Brach and Chris Pesek talk about how dancing helps them deal with their condition. Pesek reflects on her love of dance dating back to when she was a child. She never became a professional dancer, she said. “When I do this I am a dancer.”
Older voices also played a part in graduate student Adrienne Ansel’s “Fam(ily)” which she choreographed and danced solo. As she moved, her body reflected shifting emotions. At times she seemed down but she is always buoyed by the encouraging words of family members, ending with her grandfather.
Ansel also choreographed the opener “Waves” and the romantic duet “Rescued” performed by Joe Galati and Kayleigh Hahn.
Starr, a dance instructor and performer, also choreographed a piece for herself, “Atoms,” to the music of Ani DiFranco. She choreographed the finale dance “Years of Summers Gone By,” a piece that mixes whimsy with implications of a unsettled mind.
As the dancers move, sometimes slither, across what is to be taken as a rain soaked stage, a narrator, performed by Starr’s elder daughter, Summit Starr, a Columbus-based actor, wanders in with an umbrella speaking in mysterious aphorisms. She seems to grappling with something, yet as the narrator walks off stage right she is seems transfixed with an inner certainty.
***
Tickets for the dance concert are $5 for students, $8 for seniors, and $10 general admission. Tickets can be purchased through the BGSU Arts Box Office in the Wolfe Center for the Arts, online at bgsu.edu/arts, or by calling 419-372-8171. Advance discounted rates are available for groups of 10 or more. Parking is free in Lot N.
