Though I’m about to see several very professional companies at the NY Skirball Center, the energy feels more like a dance competition than a performance.  There’s intensity, discussion in between pieces and altogether a "more real than nervous for the first day of kindergarten" tight-lipped thing happening.  Instantly Dance Gotham feels like a representation of how dance is formed – through communicating and vitality.  The following four companies stood out above the other four who performed…

John-Mark Owens’ Vespers, featuring Ramona Kelly and Adrian Silver, brings vitality and life into pointe work that seems void of actual "work."  The pair’s mesmerizing duet marries grace and athleticism in a world that seems free of sharp angles.  What begins as a classically diminutive female character at the whim of the hulking male character becomes a playground for push and pull between the pair.  Just as Kelly’s strength grows beyond a classical female ballet role, Silver’s grace grows beyond a classical male ballet role.  Offering one another’s bodies as landscapes, the piece exudes infinite sensitivity.  They achieve towering shapes regardless of Kelly’s treacherous toes.  Kelly eventually abandons Silver as he lays motionless on the stage.  Owens manages to take the achingly beautiful essence of ballet to a modern place where grace does not translate to a lack of strength. 

The Dash Ensemble’s Sundowning, with choreography by Gregory Dolbashian, is beautifully enlivened by Christopher Ralph and Alexandra Johnston.  Johnston takes the focus initially with movements similar to a teenage girl donning high heals for the first time. With mannequin-esque control of her torso, her feet seem immobilized by the stage teetering one half-inch above the marley.  This focus transcends the entire piece and allows the audience to know that work is happening, that the physical bodies on the stage must exert energy to please the eyes that have marched in looking for a reason to stay open.  This is not to say that the work feels forced.  The pairing soars and connects with subtlety that softens the garish contrast of their bright yellow and purple shirts.  Power shifts flow seamlessly as their awareness of their strength is matched by the quietude of their artistry.  Ralph romances his explosiveness with lingering moments of stillness.  He flows so easily between these extremes while wearing slippery socks that the rowdy room is void of even a whisper.

Ralph appears once more in Nicholas Andre Dance’s Until Blue with choreography by Nick Ross.  Joined by five other dancers Ralph athletic movement quality shines so brightly he’s easily recognizable from earlier in the evening.  The sextet proves that bike shorts can be made beautiful when donned by the right bodies.  With just four dancers on stage unison quickly breaks into dueling duets whose energy encourages the opposite pairing.  With the six performers on stage, the energy churns like a tornado that is worth watching without that threatening deathlike quality pervading.  They forge harmonies as opposed to dissonant chords.

Camille A. Brown’s Mary proves that words never need leave the body to communicate if that body has the head to toe dexterity of Brown.  Brown has the enigmatic ability to reach the entire audience while making you feel like an audience of one.  With her full body sign language, Brown is like a body of water oozing across the stage, navigating moments of current, riding the forces of restraint and rising beyond floods.  To watch her is to feel attached both physically and emotionally to her journey.  I feel my body shift in its seat as if I can become closer to Brown by doing so.  Truly possessive of a star quality the room seems to shine brighter because of her light.  As the true highlight of Dance Gotham Brown’s three minutes would have been reason enough to travel to the NYU Skirball Center.

iDANZ Critix Corner
Official Dance Review by Eileen Elizabeth
Performance:  Dance Gotham
Venue: NYU Skirball Center
Show Date: January 8, 2010
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Julliard and Purchase once again prove that they are still churning out hot young dancers with their “DASH Ensemble”, as seven of them present Gregory Dolbashian’s Sundowning at Joyce SoHo.  Dolbashian’s sometimes-uneven choreography looks phenomenal when attacked with such commitment, although the work as an evening-length performance has miles to go before full cohesion of ideas is achieved.  However, Dolbashian presents us with a colorful display of humanity under the spell of a setting sun.

“Sundowning” or “sundown syndrome” is an unexplainable medical condition, where patients experience increased agitation and disorientation in the late afternoon/early evening.  It is thought that diminished ability to detect the onset of night might create these emotional disturbances and cardiac irregularities. Burke Wilmore’s exquisite lighting choices play with your eyes in subtle organic variations.  His vision of sunset includes both a watered down palette of colors and striking shadowy visuals in black and white.  On top of this… a sea of dancers exploring different realms of consciousness.

The piece opens as Christopher Ralph backs into the space, his eyes hazed over as if he can see nothing even after looking for too long.  Ralph is an amazing technician and is quickly joined by the equally talented Antonio Brown and Jonathan Windham.  The trio, twitching and agitated, begin to ooze mysteriously through a backward driving turn sequence, falling off balance as if in total disorientation.  All have legs for days as they hit their forehead on their knees, kick into arabesque and flip around.  I find it a shame that Dolbashian teases the audience a bit in the opening, with thoughtfully phrased movement sequences, showcasing the dancers training…  for this type of ferocious dancing only returns intermittently throughout the work.

For me, Sundowning takes a left in sections that present quite a different story. The more mature sections of solid choreography, where the intension is expressed through the body (in more of a concert style of dance) contrast sharply with more playful adolescent scenes that seem to come out of the downtown dance scene.  In the latter, the dancers joke, play and say the strangest things.  It is not that the text is inappropriate in dance- but Dolbashian needs to decide what style of dance to utilize.  He seems trapped not only between day and night – but Uptown and Downtown as well.  He takes the company of versatile movers and spends most of the evening testing out how many things he can do with a black jacket from puppet show, to security blanket, to plague infested cloak.

Starting with such beautiful movement that started to explore the theme of Sundowning, the spoken text seemed to drag the work down in a form of reverse maturity.  The text itself needs to be more thoughtfully used as I recognized excerpts from other choreographer’s works. (One example being a scene from Purchase faculty Kevin Wynn’s Tracing Sirocco in 2006).  In another text-laden section, Brown digs deep to give his best performance of the night unfortunately while repeating various shouted snippets of the phrase, “I need someone to help me understand what I am doing…how to help myself…Why can’t he just love me the way I need?”

In 2009, audiences are less concerned about the line between uptown and downtown dance scenes although Dolbashian’s effort to blur these is unsuccessful. I would welcome an edit and exploration of those sections that best captured the strange and eerie concept of “sundowning.”  Other beautiful and stunning sections appear throughout the work where dancers explore a movement idea in more fragmented ways with gradual development of a single phrase.  In several scenes, Alexandra Johnson’s extreme ability to express mood with understated movement effort is intense and stunning.

I think that exploring “sundown syndrome” through two different styles of dance was a lot to bite off.  Not to be a purist, but some of their raw movement material really got me thinking and experiencing emotion with the dancers… and it was a shame to squash that experience with the less electric “talk and play” sections. However, it is those sparks of solid dancing that convince me that The Dash Ensemble is a new company to watch! 

iDANZ Critix Corner
Official Dance Review by Sasha Deveaux
Performance:  The DASH Ensemble
Choreographer: Gregory Dolbashian
Dancers: Antonio Brown, Marie Doherty, Caitlin Fennick, Alexandra Johnson, Christopher Ralph, Shakirah Stewart and Jonathan Windham.
Lighting: Burke Wilmore
Venue: Joyce SoHo
Date: Friday, December 4, 2009 @ 8:00pm
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Sundowning is the debut production of the New York-based contemporary dance company, The DASH Ensemble.  The evening length work is comprised of several highly physical chapters that blur the line between the rational and psychotic mind.  The concert takes its audience through a daring display of deep connections between its characters and the connections they make within themselves through both real and imaginative circumstances.  The term "sundowning" refers to a state of confusion at the end of the day and into the night, often leading to a state of increased agitation, activity and even borderline demented behavior.  All types of agitating behaviors are forms of communication. The company uses this phenomenon as a platform to display a broad abstraction of self-realization showing that no matter how far one’s mind can take him outside the realm of what is deemed "real," a person can and will obtain a very real and tangible result in his own development.

Dancers:  Christopher Ralph, Alexandra Johnson, Jonathan Windham, Shakirah Stewart, Antonio Brown, Caitlin Fennick, Marie Doherty, and Gregory Dolbashian.  Musician: Sam Rivers.  Lighting Design by Burke Wilmore.

The DASH Ensemble is a diverse company of dance artists with a shared commitment to expanding physical and theatrical boundaries of contemporary dance in the twenty-first century, while exploring and challenging the potential of individual artistic realization of new movement expressions, within a group guided and founded by artistic director Gregory Dolbashian. 

Born and raised in New York City, Gregory Dolbashian (Choreographer) received his training at the Alvin Ailey School on a fellowship scholarship and then graduated cum laude from SUNY Purchase dance conservatory were he studied composition with Kazuko Hirabayashi. Since then he as gone on to dance and choreograph with a variety of artists, performing withPatrick Corbin, Nelly van Bommel, Sylvain Emard, and The Chicago Ballet. He was resident choreographer for both Chicago Ballet’s spring season in 2008 and CorbinDances in 2007. He was selected as one of four emerging choreographers in the Springboard Montreal intensive run by Julliard’s Alexandra Wells, where he created and premiered his first international work. Gregory’s work has been presented in New York at the Reverb Festival at the Alvin Ailey Theatre, SummerDanz at Dance Theater Work Shop, Symphony Space and at the Gershwin Hotel.  The company will next appear in January 2010 on the program of Dance Gotham at the Skirball Center.
Gregory Dolbashian is supported by the Emerging Artist Mentorship program of Gotham Arts Exchange, made possible with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, and through The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 through funds distributed by the National Endowment of the Arts.

These performances were made possible, in part by, The Joyce Theater Foundation, which owns and operates Joyce SoHo.

The DASH Ensemble
Joyce SoHo
155 Mercer (between Houston and Prince Streets), NYC
December 4-6, 2009
Friday, December 4 and Saturday, December 5 at 8pm; December 6, 2009 at 3pm
Tickets $20 ($15 for students/seniors/DancePass)
Tickets can be purchased at www.joyce.org or by phone at (212) 352-3101 or (866) 811-4111
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