Sarah Skaggs Dance. - Colorado Dance Festival, Casey Middle School, Boulder, Colorado - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, Nov, 1995 by Janine Gastineau

CASEY MIDDLE SCHOOL, BOULDER JULY 28-29, 1995 REVIEWED BY JANINE GASTINEAU For all of you in-the-closet dancers, the chance to participate came last July. One breezy summer night, a wildly decorated middle school gymnasium in Boulder became a holy place of rhythm and funk. Walls were hung with banners and murals. An altar of icons, candles, and fruit encircled a deejay's platform. Bass boomed from speakers blasting Top Forty hits. Everyone was on their feet, grooving: kids with parents, women and men in groups, pairs or blissfully alone. The proverbial joint was jumping. Higher Ground, Sarah Skaggs's postmodern dance party, had come to town.

Higher Ground, the closing performance of the 1995 Colorado Dance Festival, embodies Skaggs's particular synthesis of dance, both social and concert. Garnering glimpses of techno and hip-hop, ballet, Balinese dance, and voguing, all crossbred with post-modern dance, Higher Ground's format is her testament to dance's universality as art, as ritual, as celebration.

After a half hour of preshow dancing by the audience the five members of Sarah Skaggs Dance burst out, flinging themselves into and through the space with an energy that seemed too large to contain. The company was, by itself, interesting to look at: of various body types, ethnic backgrounds, and techniques. But Skaggs has chosen well; in unison, they all dance tall and positively eat up the floor with their feet.

Particularly dazzling was Eric Bradley, long-limbed and fast, whose jumps suspended him in midair; and the stately Melissa Wynn, saying more with one indolent gesture of an arm than most of us can with an entire body. Wynn and Patricia McCarthy, paired respectively with Bradley and Ariel Herrera, switched partners midway through one of the evening's most striking sections. This languid, sensuous quartet gave us a glimpse into that most private of worlds between people, beyond words, in the breathing.

But only briefly. Then they were off again. I had to keep reminding myself that there were only five dancers. Another score for Skaggs: her choreography makes the floor look full. The company raced nonstop through ensemble, solo, ensemble, duet, and so on, ending forty minutes later in a pounding, manic finish. The dancers spun wildly before flinging themselves into the floor, again and again, ending downstage at our feet. I felt as if the wind had left my body, watching such wild abandonment.

The Colorado Dance Festival also hosted the Ralph Lemon Company, Hirokazu Kosaka, butoh artists Uno Man and Mitsuyo Uesugi, performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena with Roberto Sifunetes, Latino theater company Su Teatro, and writer Elaine Segal.