Review: Here. Now. by Andrea Ariel Dance Theatre
by David Glen Robinson
Andrea Ariel Dance Theatre (AADT) continues its winding path along the leading edge of the Austin performing arts community with Here. Now. The show is an essential dance show with exquisite live music accompaniment. The show is a compound of techniques and themes that Ariel has addressed in her 35-year Austin dance career. It intentionally incorporates elements of AADT’s Community Voices workshops, endowing it with reflections and echoes of AADT’s 2024 Borderless show.
Leading-edge fine arts performance companies in Austin are blending their concepts with music groups for live performance in their shows. Andrea Ariel’s collaborators are longer term, individuals with many seasons of her dance performance work. The musical ensemble for Here. Now. is one blending an impressive array of musical genres. Frederico Geib, Claude McCan, Bruno Vinezof, Andres Acevedo, and Rey Arteaga are the musicians. Their collaboration with the choreographers was a creative goldmine, making beautiful music that merged with the imagery created by the choreographers and dancers.
As Ariel wrote in her web programme : “Audiences will experience powerful explorations of memory and transformation tracing the arc of self-discovery, from childhood innocence to independence, crisis, and healing; delving into the dualities shaped by culture—balancing harmony and conflict, tradition and change, belonging and solitude; and the eclectic influences of music, fashion, and cinema shaping artistic evolution and self-expression.” Ariel has addressed these ideas and cultural features in a career-long odyssey of contemplation, commitment, struggle, and virtuosic art. The music and dance in Here. Now. expressed her programme observations brilliantly.
The structure of the show, the physicality to express the ideas, was unusual for contemporary dance concerts in Austin. Most productions merely present all the dance pieces neatly framed by the music and lighting for the piece, giving concerts a composite look. Ariel blended all the on-stage work in a continuous flow of imagery and music. The introduction brought onstage all the collaborators backed by a montage video featuring images from Ariel’s recent Community Voices workshops, which were offered to all skill levels in the community. The performing choreographers demonstratedlive some of the exercises from the workshops. These sent perhaps the most important message from the stage: dance exercises created and performed by so-called amateurs can be stageworthy pieces of art. The deeper message is that anyone can create fine arts dance. All one must do is try. One suspects from background information that the video and graphics onscreen was the product of videographer Colin Lowry, an AADT associate.
The focal dance pieces were the results of work of invited guest collaborating choreographers. Ariel choreographed complex transitions into and between the dances, each of them individual peaks in the flow of sense percepts. Anuradha Naimpally performed a duet blending modern/contemporary phrases and staging with traditional Indian dance. Along with movement, Naimpally incorporated bright fabrics in costume and props. She is a master of the Indian forms, with their codified hand and arm gestures and facial expressions that go back thousands of years. Naimpally’s dance conveyed this sense of great onrushing time in which humanity participates. A useful comparison may be made with Jeff Bezos’s 10,000-year clock. But whereas Bezos suggests that humanity and his Blue Origin space launch company lie at the beginning of a great cycle, Indian dance may already be over halfway there in a cycle of coherence and wisdom. But, make no mistake, we offer great credit to Bezos and no complaint.
Ciceley Fullylove performed in a duet sampler of rhythm and blues and modern forms. The dancers wore matching costumes and frequently made mirroring gestures and phrases that suggested call-and-response exercises in movement. Fullylove’s choreography gives attention to the smallest detail, and she performs it flawlessly.
Jun “Sunny” Shen also offered a duet, which was characteristically abstract. Costumes were exactly complementary themed solids in red and black with a large circle on the front of each t-shirt. The reference to the Eastern yin-yang symbol was unmistakable, but it was the dancers who applied the movement suggested by the symbol. They took the dance well beyond the fundamental dualities implied, to the human quest for identity and connection with others. Sunny seems uniquely gifted with the ability to express abstract concepts in movement.
Luis Ordaz Gutiérrez also danced a duet. His profile characteristic is humor and lots of it. He is a strong modern performer, also skilled in improvisation. Gutiérrez loves the stage, so it was surprising when he fell off it into the orchestra pit, his partner apparently quaking in fear at Gutiérrez’s anger when he returned. But that was a joke, the kind the child in everyone has always wanted to see.
Gutiérrez’s work was the last focal dance in the show. As a peripheral note, the names of the dueting partners of the pieces in the text above are not listed in any of the hardcopy or online material about the dances available to this reviewer, but all were admirable performers. Their faces and names will emerge again soon in other successful performances. No worries. To quote Tom Petty, “The waiting is the hardest part.”
Here. Now. was a patchwork quilt of diversity, teaching the lesson of the common search for identity, purpose, and meaning across every culture. The quest is very much a current issue, in several guises. AADT shines the light of fine art on most if not all of them.
Here. Now.
by Andrea Ariel Dance Company
Andrea Ariel Dance Theatre
May 01 - May 03, 2025
Thursday, May 1 – Friday, May 2 – Saturday, May 3 at 8pm.
George Washington Carver Cultural Center – Boyd Vance Theater
1165 Angelina St., Austin, TX
Tickets for Here. Now. start at $25 and can be purchased at https://shor.by/672C
MORE: arieldance.org | facebook.com/AndreaArielDanceTheatre
