Friday, November 18, 2016

iLuminate Comes to Town and My Heart Is Swayed By Blinky Lights

iLuminate is a dance company in which everything is done in the dark, with light.  The costumes light up, as do the props.  Rather than conventional set changes, the lights go off, and then come back in different patterns, taking us from house to street to through a magic portal.  Rather than regular costume changes, the color and patterns of the dancers' gear shifts.  Magic pixel insects called out by a magic paintbrush fly up into the darkness and a green outline rat runs out from under green outline trashcans.  (I am so in love with the green rat.) 

I was extremely impressed.  This is technology meets dance in a way that forces us to pay attention to both, without being so busy making sure we know that Art is a Serious Philosophical Pursuit or They Are Using Modern Technology to do Art as to lose the fun and natural flow.

(Not that I am against art as a serious philosophical pursuit or using modern technology to do art.  I'm in favor of both.  But if you have to tell your audience that your art is Serious and they should be feeling Reverent Aesthetic Bliss, you're doing it wrong.  Likewise if the best use you can come up with for your fancy backdrop projector is a bizarre parade of iconic figures not related to a story mediocre to start with, you're again doing it wrong.) 

Rather, iLuminate gave us a lovely evening exploring what dance looks like if dancers light up the dark, rather than being light-reflecting objects in light.  The story was archetypal: love rejected and accepted, outcasts finding solace in other worlds, magic, giant glowy snakes, and badness being conquered through love and dance.

The choreography was solid and technically impressive.  The lifts and partner tricks were extra impressive done with a partner invisible in the dark.  I felt that hands and lower legs needed more illumination, and the heads less: a number of beautiful high kicks, front and back walkovers, and other moves were not as visible as they needed to be to show off how lovely they were.

The main character was recognizable through his dance, but the other characters needed more personality dance-wise.  (This is something I'm really trying to work on with my dance, so I'm paying extra attention to others' dance, to try to get a feel for what I need to be doing or not doing.)  The blend of hip-hop and ballet was interesting and I thought fairly seamless, although concentrated on big flashy moves rather than on an overall fleshed-out flow.  But that might be me coming from Kuchipudi where you can perfectly well spend half a dance drama simply having the 2 or 3 main characters introduce themselves (the pravesam, or introductory dance.  Satyabhama's pravesam is the highlight of the famous Kuchipudi dance drama Satyabhama.)

I liked what I could hear of the music, it was about being what you are and other good sentiments, but the volume was turned up way way way too loud, and I missed a lot of the treble lines because I had to keep my fingers in my ears. 

iLuminate was founded by Miral Kotb, a software engineer and dancer who meshed her loves.  She is my new hero, and her iLuminate is fabulous!   

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