The review from Jordan Levin at
The Miami Herald:
The Florida Dance Festival Winterfest closed Jan. 3 with performances from three nationally known contemporary dance artists that tackled intellectual and physical boundaries. The audience at the Colony Theater was light on a cold evening at the end of the holiday weekend, but the work -- by cutting edge New York choreographer Wally Cardona, veteran dance-theater maker David Dorfman, and fiery disabled dance troupe AXIS -- generated sparks.
The highlight was the premiere of Dorfman's Light Shelter, created over the course of the weeklong Winterfest for AXIS Dance Company and 10 Miami performers (both trained and untrained) assembled for the occasion, a commission co-sponsored by Tigertail Productions. Dorfman has a long, illustrious history creating pieces using community members and issues, but the illumination in Light Shelter came largely from AXIS' five fiercely committed dancers. Based in San Francisco, AXIS is one of the most highly regarded companies in the realm of disabled dance, and this performance showed why -- the dancers show an unusual willingness to push their own physical limitations and explore the theatrical and physical possibilities of combining disabled and normally abled dancers.
Particularly striking was the wheelchair-bound but definitely not limited Rodney Bell, a physically powerful, charismatic performer who was terrifically compelling in Alex Ketley's Vessel, a duet for Bell and the tiny, explosive Sonsheree Giles. As they spun round each other, or as Giles flipped over Bell's shoulder or stretched perilously across his lap, the pair generated plenty of physical dynamism as well as sensual heat.
Light Shelter was best when Dorfman focused on the AXIS dancers (Bell, Giles, Janet Das, Sebastian Grubb and Alice Sheppard, who was also in a wheelchair), who move with an exciting animal energy -- racing each other, ricocheting in response to voiced commands.
Light Shelter as a whole, however, felt diffused and somewhat unclear. It opens with the community performers circling amid Heather Basarab's striking lighting design of long fluorescent lights on the stage floor and other lights dangling overhead. They clump together, stopping for short, mostly gestural or pedestrian sequences, which don't develop much theatrical or choreographic oomph. Their intensity makes them potentially interesting, but we don't get much of a sense of them as individuals or a community, and they're separate from the AXIS dancers, so it's unclear how all of them fit together, or why. Some verbal exchanges between the AXIS dancers seemed simplistic: ``Let's go for a walk, I'll roll, you'll walk, since you can't roll'' and even disingenuous (saying ``this is a choice'' about walking or rolling even if one person has no choice about using a wheelchair). Light Shelter seemed more sketch than finished piece.
The opener, Cardona's Light Conversation, was anything but -- Cardona and Rahel Vonmoos dancing mostly to a recording of a dense conversation about Kierkegaard's philosophy and other untweetable subjects. The movement is subtly virtuosic in its fluidity and dynamic changes, full of twists and drops and isolations, while Cardona and Vonmoos have an intense, but undefined relationship. As the voices drone on about aesthetics and relationships, you find yourself splitting your attention between listening and watching. At first the mix is distracting, puzzling, then it becomes oddly exhilarating, as if your mind were opening to see the dancing in some entirely different place.
The review from Jordan Levin at The Miami Herald: