Cicada Song and Shortening Days
Ground Works Dance Theatre in Tremont

For Cleveland's dance audience, the migrations of local companies from one outdoor venue to the next marks the passing of summer as surely as cicada song and shortening days. By the time Verb and Ground Works – to name just 2 – have danced in Cain Park and Akron's Heinz Poll Summer Dance Festival, summer's winding down. When we come at last to the August dance performances in Tremont's Lincoln Park, summer's all but flown. We linger in August ‘s fine evenings and soak up FREE outdoor dance concerts and their priceless ambience while we can.

The sponsors of these Ground Works Dance Theater performances in Tremont – City of Cleveland, ParkWorks, Councilman Joe Cimperman, and Tremont West Development Corporation – will be getting their money's worth. The aptly named 10-year-old company has worked hard and well, not only rehearsing their dancing in the summer heat, but on understanding what their audiences expect.

Appropriate to the good times of summer, Ground Works gives us crowd-pleasing music with a great beat in Boom Boom, Artistic Director David Shimotakahara's [pictured below] latest piece for the company's 6 dancers, a tribute to American Blues. Boom Boom shakes it up to Mae Big Mama Thornton's ‘Hound Dog' and various recordings by Aretha Franklin, Odetta, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and others.

"Boom Boom has been a very popular piece with audiences and we've had a lot of fun performing it," said Shimotakahara in a phone interview. "It has wonderful old Blues music and with the movement what I've done is not just the boogie woogie style movement but responding to the music by working with surfaces – the floor, the walls, each other [pictured]. Beyond that it's just a really fun piece for summer audiences."

Boom Boom also includes something seldom seen in contemporary dance - a set, which provides walls for the dancers to work with. Designed and constructed by Michael Roesch, we wonder if two-by-fours from this sturdy set piece won't be feeding somebody's wood stove should high energy prices accompany winter's chill.

Artistic Associate Amy Miller's latest choreographic effort, Allow, fulfills the dance audience's desire for beautiful, sweeping lines. We reviewed the premiere of Allow at Trinity Cathedral last November and were struck by the abundance of spectacular partnering movements. Again and again the 4 dancers, Felise Bagley, Sarah Perrett, Kelly Brunk, and Damien Highfield, started by rolling on the ground and seemingly flung themselves into lifts high in the air. As we wrote in Cool Cleveland, "Many is the contemporary choreographer who has set out to create dance movement along these lines, and seldom is the result so original, fluid, and fully formed."

Another thing about Allow is the democratic exchange of partners. From the company's most senior dancers, Bagley and Highfield, to the most recent additions to the company, Perrett and Brunk, everybody partners everybody – and looks good doing it -- in an equal opportunity way too rare in the dance world.

The taped, atmospheric score for Allow was composed by recent Oberlin grad Alex Christie.

So far we've talked about the upcoming concert in terms of music and dance technique, but For You strikes an emotionally resonant chord. Commissioned by Ground Works from Alex Ketley, a very contemporary emerging choreographer based in San Francisco, For You puts the choreographer's and the dancers' ballet training firmly in the background and – without developing narrative or character – explores what Ketley feels emerging in interactions between dancers.

In an interview last winter Ketley explained that he is "always trying to find an emotional undercurrent in the work. For instance, in the final duet in the work I did here in Cleveland for Ground Works, it's very definitely a very tender duet but I never set out to make a dance about anything; it's just that there are these emotional undercurrents and hopefully they resonate with an audience." And indeed, that final duet is, in a family friendly way, one of the sexiest, most intimate dance duets we've ever seen. In choreographing Miller and Brunk's unpredictable sallies and feints, pushes and pulls, Ketley drew on techniques from rock climbing and contact improvisation, but he tapped into a deep well of emotion as well.

Ketley says, "I like performance and performers when they get swept up and consumed by movements." Music for the bruising sextet that begins For You is by Philip Jeck, an English multimedia composer. Music on guitar and vocal for the final duet is by indy neo-soul group Bon Iver, which means ‘good winter.'

Ground Works Dance Theater http://www.notsoobvious.com, performs at 8:30 pm Fri 8/14 and Sat 8/15 in Lincoln Park in Tremont, W 14th St & Kenilworth. FREE. Bring lawn chairs and blankets.

by Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas
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