While the pandemic is over for most, long COVID and new variants continue to affect a small but not insignificant part of our population. The local dance scene still, in a sense, faces fallout from long COVID. Fewer opportunities exist for DMV-based small dance companies and independent choreographers to produce their works. Once-busy venues for local dance productions have either closed or drastically reduced their performing seasons — Dance Place in the Brookland neighborhood of Northeast DC, Joy of Motion’s now-defunct Jack Guidone Theater in Friendship Heights, and the now-closed American Dance Institute in Rockville, to name just a few lost opportunities for dance companies.
That makes the self-produced programs at Capital Fringe, like Partings: Dance of Letting Go, a necessary component in the dance ecosystem for choreographers and small companies in the District and its suburbs. Partings, a shared program of new and recent works, featured East Coast modern dancemakers — Stacey Yvonne Claytor, Joan Gavaler, Giselle Ruzany, and Malcom Shute — in a program that Shute said drew on themes of surrender, loss, parting, and, perhaps, finding one’s way back.
Claytor’s “Together/Alone: A Place of Healing,” an excerpt, contrasted a single dancer with a group of seven women using spoken and movement phrases and responses. “Where does it hurt?” “Everywhere.” “Help.” “Heal.” “Heed.” The choreographic language was informed by gut-wrenching contractions, tremors and pulls of hands, collapses and space-engulfing runs.
“Connective Tissue,” from Ruzany’s Gestalt projects, featured the choreographer and Antonella Garcia, each with a sound apparatus wrapped on their forearm. When they connected — touched — the soundscore by Brian Davis would stop. The work built tension as the duo embraced, pushed away, circled each other, then separated. There’s more to explore in this brief encounter.
Shute and fellow dancer/choreographer Katie Sopoci Drake crafted “Fiddleheads” with Gregorio Allegri’s operatic memoriam Miserere: Il salmo miserere mei Deus. There’s a primal, preternatural sense to the duet as Shute supports Drake’s full supine body. They navigate the floor in hyperalert rolls and crawls, finally contorting themselves into a boat-like shape for a journey of consolation.
Growth and discovery fill the final two works, a solo, “The We Inside,” by Gavaler featured text from Jill Bolte Taylor’s “My Stroke of Insight” along with disjointed movement that capitulates to losing physical control. And Shute’s Human Landscape Dance closed the evening with “Emerging,” an homage to plant life slowly pushing through soil in search of sunlight, synthesizing undulating, full-bodied movement from an upward trajectory.
Running Time: 70 minutes
Genre: Dance
Dates and Times: (This show’s run has ended.)
Venue: Cafritz Hall, 1529 16th St NW
Tickets: $15
More Info and Tickets: Partings: Dances of Letting Go
Partings: Dances of Letting Go
Presented by Human Landscape Dance, Claytor Company, Aura CuriAtlas Physical Theatre, Giselle Ruzany
Director: Malcolm Shute
Choreographers: Stacey Yvonne Claytor, Joan Gavaler, Giselle Ruzany, and Malcolm Shute
Performers: Stacey Yvonne Claytor, Joan Gavaler, Giselle Ruzany, Carrie Monger, Brian Davis, Antonella Garcia, Rachael Fine, Stefanie Bass, Malcolm Shute, Katie Sopoci Drake
The complete 2024 Capital Fringe Festival schedule is online here
