Review: Pivot by Performa/Dance

by David Glen Robinson
Published on August 22, 2024

PIVOT, organized by Performa/Dance, swam in the milieu of new ballet with always striking and often surprising interpretations and movement. Here was a new Alice for a modern Wonderland.

The group ballet show Pivot has just closed its brief run at Austin Ventures Studio in downtown Austin. Produced by Performa/Dance, Pivot was exemplary of new ballet, which incorporates new concepts and performance practices and addresses social issues.   Performa/Dance deconstructs creative material that comes its way, embracing hybridity and incorporating new media and forms unusual or unheard of in traditional ballet. Yet the company’s performances can be considered nothing other than ballet. Hence the fault …

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Review: The Mad Scene by Performa/Dance

by David Glen Robinson
Published on June 12, 2022

MAD SCENE from Jennifer Hart offers a goo of images and actions, soaring and crawling, angelic and monstrous, unified and diverse, harmonizing and chaotic. Fame and notoriety are empty. We have left the Louis XIV 's ballets far behind.

Something snapped deep in Jennifer Hart‘s brain. Mad Scene flowed out, a goo of images and actions, all soaring and crawling, angelic and monstruous, unified and diverse, harmonizing and chaotic. Time played for putty in Hart’s hands, with a giant set of the great hall of Versailles in projection and a disco ball over stage center. Projections and video gave us more views of Versailles, woodland Texas, and stone architecture, locations unknown. The first dance …

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Review: Bluegrass Junction by Performa/Dance

by David Glen Robinson
Published on October 24, 2021

Joy and Brilliance. This could have been the subtitle of Performa/Dance's BLUEGRASS JUNCTION, brilliantly expressed in ballet-structured dances choreographed by artistic director Jennifer Hart.

Joy and Brilliance. This could have been the subtitle of the show. As it is, Bluegrass Junction, simple and evocative, modestly concealed its joy and brilliance until the audience was in place and saw it for itself. Then the introductory dance with the full ensemble exploded with the handclapping, foot-stomping, live music-playing joy of an Appalachian hoedown. The flying imagery channeled any number of paintings by Thomas Hart Benton, all of it under the open …

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