Letter to the Editor - Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet

Richard L. Penberthy
November 7, 2005

"An Evening of Three Choreographers" at Cedar Lake on Friday, November 4, was a sensation. What a wonderful place in which to view intimately scaled dance. All three dances were strong and good, but the third captured me. "Seed", in my understanding (and digest of the program) is based upon a reverse view of the idea that we see glimpses of our life before we die ("his life passed before his eyes"). This dance considers that perhaps we see glimpses of our life, too, just before we are born. Love, work, companionship, pain, and death flash in consciousness or pre-consciousness. With a company of very strong well-trained dancers and an obvious decision to NOT work in the same idiom with each glimpse, the dance became more - much more - than the sum of its parts. Projections of the dancers in various activities and locations onto Stonehenge-like forms resonate with the dance onstage. Projections of the dancers underwater intimate pre-birth. Thick, unlikely ! headphones with long coiled (think landline telephone) cords imply the umbilical cord as easily as they imply time, gestation. At once point, a dancer onstage, nearing birth, appears in a shirt of cord, almost thick as clothesline, which has been broadly slip-knotted, crocheted really, about his torso, so that as he moves, the shirt unravels loop slipping through loop slipping through loop. Birth itself is represented in a video projection of the dancer breaking the surface. It is one of those dances that engages the viewer (not just me - I was only one among a rapt audience) emotionally and intellectually.

That the concept so seduces and that the staging and costuming are so fine demands that the choreography itself be stratospherically imaginative. It is, and it is as visceral as it is dream-like. And the performances - there is not a dancer on stage who has forgotten that her or his dream was to be the best. Every one there understands the dance and the purpose and the music and the importance of the moment. They are a universe.

Remarkable.

Cedar Lake performed at 547 West 26th Street in New York City. http://www.cedarlakedance.com

An Evening of Three Choreographers will be performed Oct 24-25 at 7 pm, Oct 27-29 at 8 pm, Nov 3-5 and 10-12 at 8 pm, with 2 pm Saturday matinees Oct 29, Nov 5 and 12. Tickets can be purchased through SmartTix at 212-868-4444 or www.SmartTix.com.

Jessica Coleman Scott
Photo courtesy of Steven Baillie

See also Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet with dinner at Jake's Saloon - 10/24/2005 - by Robert Abrams. - Article sponsored by Freed of London.