Dancers bring high energy to stage
By Steve Sucato - NEWS CONTRIBUTING REVIEWER - July 12, 2009
For their first appearance at Artpark, Buffalo’s LehrerDance offered up a program of their most popular repertory works along with three premieres all choreographed by artistic director Jon Lehrer.
The 2-year-old national touring company gave the appreciative Artpark audience a healthy dose of the Lehrer style of dance he calls “organic athleticism,” which mixes a number of dance styles and resulted Friday night in several outbursts of boisterous applause and a standing ovation at program’s end.
The first half of Lehrer-Dance’s program featured four mostly light-hearted dance works opening with the premiere of “Fused by 8,” an upbeat and jazzy dance work in three sections for the company’s eight dancers set to a classical/ club music amalgamation by Black Violin. In two sections that book-ended the third, Lehrer’s dancers bounced, glided and somersaulted their way on and off the stage in bursts of brisk movement. By contrast, the work’s middle section highlighted the piece, showcasing slow and deliberate acrobatic partnering that served as a precursor to the program’s second new work “Morphic Slip.”
In “Morphic Slip,” dancers Jennifer Huffman and Theodore Krzykowski costumed in bobsled racer-looking suits, moved like reptiles along the stage floor before melding into more sculptural intertwinings of bodies.
Rounding out the first half of the program were the quirky and humorous “Loose Canon,” set to Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major, and Lehrer’s feel-good ode to his high school days “Bridge and Tunnel,” set to a bevy of Paul Simon hits.
The program’s second half featured a collection of LehrerDance’s more acclaimed works, including the primal male duet “Instinct” and the gripping and introspective solo work “The Way Within,” danced with emotional intensity by Marideth Wanat.
Those were followed by the evening’s final premiere work “Trois,” a clever trio dance where the performers executed a series of inventive physical interactions and eye-engaging hand and arm movements to delightful effect.
The program closed with the company’s signature work, the highly energetic and athletic “A Ritual Dynamic.”
Lehrer’s choreography for the work was a relentless and dynamic blending of unison group dancing with pops of individual “wow” moments where dancers flipped through the air and flung themselves into each others arms. Danced with verve by the full company, the piece proved a fitting end to an exciting dance program.