Review: Gold Show/Rose Show by Galaxy Dance Studio
by David Glen Robinson
Gold Show/Rose Show is a yearly performance series produced independently by Heloise Gold and Julie Nathanielsz. This year’s installment, as usual around the Memorial Day holiday, was performed at Galaxy Dance Studio. The show presented some treasures of dance-based performance. It rewards all the attention its fans give it. This performance was made especially enjoyable by the expert technical lighting, sound, and video production by Natalie George Productions and Eliot Haynes. A special recognition for stage management, so often overlooked, goes to Patti Neff Tiven.
Yo, Genesis by Julie Nathanielsz was the first piece, a long improvisational solo set to music composed by Maija Hynninen. Forming in dance is the creation of meaningful movement, shapes, or cadences. Nathanielsz showed us how she forms in this particular piece, hence the title. The delight of this dance was watching the responses to impulse by the dancer, sometimes in response to the music, sometimes against the music. It was also fun to watch Nathanielsz, adept at improvisation, finding expressive movement in unusual or unexpected parts of the body, as in her knuckles on the floor or her spine relaxing downward between her shoulders as she lay propped up on her elbows on the stage. Appreciation of this kind of improvisation is heightened by the observer having performed in this way oneself and recalling one’s experiences. As jazz is called the musician’s music, so improvisation is the dancer’s dance.
Hips and Jet Streams was billed as a collaborative duet with Elaine Dove and Heloise Gold, danced largely to Middle Eastern dance music. Gold is literally the gold standard of Austin theatre, dance, and performance art. She moved to Austin in 1978 and has experimented and performed widely in the three and a half decades since. Dove is a performer and practitioner of an impressive number of movement techniques and counseling forms. This shared world of skills and experience created a relaxed-looking and humor-filled dance.
Black Stockings was a short, highly experimental film by Rich Armington and Heloise Gold, with editing by Diana Prechter. Film buffs will search for this treasure for decades to come, but the dance crowd who saw it in Gold Show/Rose Show left satisfied with this unexpected offering. The premise was simple and profound, and the content was largely images of Ms Gold from the knees down, with a few overall shots, playing on an overturned metal stock tank in New Mexico and wading barefooted on a beach, probably on the Gulf of Mexico. The film was superbly shot and edited, with significant contributions from cell phone videos.
The Sound That Shook the World was another collaborative duet, between Ms Gold and Jason Phelps. Singing and vocalizing conveyed much of the humor, with an assist from outlandish eye makeup. The piece showed us everything one would expect from bad opera, all for laughs.
Margery Segal’s The Backup Dancer: Bits and Acts from the Night Train finished the show with a dance piece having seven cast members. The piece seemed more based in narrative than the other works in the show. Bits and pieces, including repeated lines of text and soundtrack sound effects, created a quasi-memoir told in nonlinear fashion. Altogether, the bits fell together magically, like a 600-piece picture puzzle thrown in the air only to have all its parts fall back down in their correctly joined, completed puzzle picture. And this picture was a profound piece of abstract dance. Segal seems a master of this style of performance; she taught workshops in it in the 1990s. In those workshops she taught parts of Keith Johnstone’s Impro System and composition using guided imagery and other techniques. Some of the processes and procedures of her work seemed similar to the literary non-linear cut-up technique of Williams S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin.
This all hit the stage in the current piece with a lot of skilled modern technique dancing by Segal and Nathanielsz. They used various step phrases, syncopation, and a lot of upper body movements, especially spoking. But in the very beginning, Nathanielsz danced far upstage while Segal danced downstage on the floor, using spinal movements and twists, as a child on a couch, or perhaps one in the womb. Later, the rest of the cast entered and added varied imagery and text. Among the cast members were Tim Mateer and Joy Cunningham, impressively skilled and committed Austin performers since the 1990s. The phrases “You are everything. Everything is you,” were repeated at intervals. At one point, the cast dressed Ms Segal in a black shroud that came up to her neck. Three large heads of cabbage were placed on the stage in front of her. There she stood, immoveable, behind a line of inanimate cabbages no doubt rated more highly skilled than the backup dancer. Every dancer in the world must have felt like this at some point in his or her career. The last moment in the dance brought tears to all, as the two principal dancers danced smoothly and serenely toward the audience, away from a sensually dancing line of cabbages, leaving them far behind.
Gold Show/Rose Show
Galaxy Dance Studio
May 29 – Sunday, June 1, 2014 *One weekend only*
Thursday-Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m.
Seating is limited. $18 – 35 sliding scale. Purchase online http://gsrs.bpt.me/ or call (512) 669-6985
