Hannah Kahn Dance Company. - Space for Dance, Boulder, Colorado - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, Jan, 1996 by Janine Gastineau

It is Colorado's immense good fortune that choreographer Hannah Kahn has relocated here from New York City. Recent performances by her company displayed the characteristic complexity of her work, augmented by an ever-deepening awareness of the body's capabilities. With a dizzying amount of detail, her dancers seem choreographed down to their toenails, yet they move with a blitheness that belies the difficulty.

Kahn's Simultaneous Reverberations (1995) resonates with weight shifts and suspend-and-release phrasing. An upstage couple quietly rest, lean, and support each other, all behind an ever-changing soloist. One particularly lovely moment: Carmela Weber forming a circle of her arms, extending her leg through the circle, and developeeing the same leg to the ceiling. Then, reaching up with one hand, she grabs her toes and flexes her foot with an insouciant air.

Wheeling, a premiere with dancers weaving in and out, spiraling around themselves and coming together only to separate, has a nice hesitancy about it. Soloists are backed by a trio seated upstage (echoing an occasional gesture or roll of the head) that eventually begins to stack itself up, the dancers curving over onto each other like nested spoons.

With its score (by The Chieftains) and costuming (a faint nod to Celtic tradition in brief kilts worn by the dancers) Linger Awhile, also new, suggests an altogether different world, tender, poignant, sometimes playful. Slow, dreamy ensemble phrases give way to couples running onstage hand in hand, then off again, in relay with another pair.

Still, despite some lovely phrases set to evocative music, Linger doesn't sink into memory the way another premiere, Double Helix, does. This duet has two women, Tonya Goodwin and Carolyn James-Arras, twist and spiral, reaching and retreating. Goodwin, managing the lifts with little effort, danced this piece with aching sweetness. James-Arras, an extremely musical dancer with endless legs and a fawn's face, seemed to send the movement soaring out into the space beyond her.

More Dancing to Singing (1995), to songs from the Beatles' Rubber Soul album, closed the evening. Performed with loads of spirit, it nevertheless seemed least successful. At times bypassing the music's underlying drive or complex rhythms, the work still has some moments that rock. And in the recapitulation and layering of key phrases in the final section, More Dancing springs to life.

Watching this performance, I got the sense that Kahn's choreography, though relatively unchanged over the years in approach and language, is now realizing its greatest potential - pure, gorgeous movement that sings.