Review: AIDS Outreach Center Benefit Concert | Dance TCU | Erma Lowe Hall Studio Theatre - Fort Worth

Fort Worth — On dreary, rainy nights, something good must reward your venturing out, especially when it means driving 55 miles. For me the drive started out on U.S. 75, which merged onto Interstate 635, then Interstate 35, then Loop 12, then Interstate 30 and finally ended up on University Drive with a trek to Erma Lowe Hall Studio Theatre on the Texas Christian University campus. As for the TCU students who made up half the audience, all they had to manage was a short walk and umbrellas. 

This was the seventh year for the AIDS Outreach Center Benefit Concert, and the first year that it featured professional dancers and musicians. It could hardly go wrong with Bruce Wood Dance Project. Contemporary Dance/Fort Worth and DanceTCU, on the other hand, can be iffy, and Big Rig Dance Collective and Epiphany DanceArts, fairly new to the scene, were the wildcards. 

So first, the wildcards, with Epiphany DanceArts representing everything ethereal, feminine and graceful and Big Rig just the opposite. In gauzy, glittery dress, with hair neatly braided, 11 women soared and swirled through three sections of Sign No More. They moved often in diagonal lines, breaking apart to disappear and reform, with each action smooth, gentle and yet rich. As the name Epiphany suggests, this little ballet embraced longing and hope, perfect for a concert that paid tribute to the battle with AIDS. 

If Sign No More was sweet, Big Rig Dance Collective’s Grit was rough and unruly. Four women in cargo pants, T-shirts and disheveled hair, faces unadorned with makeup, pushed and shoved and occasionally leaned on one another. They bunched up, tore away, then made sharp turns to leap into each other’s arms. It was heady stuff, chaotic and impulsive, the emblem of tumultuous times. 

DanceTCU offered a pleasant surprise in Sam Wuehrmann’s Enclosure, partly for the original music composed by Joe Cannariato and Rylad Elmasri from Synaesthetic Kaleidoscope & the Band of Merry Pranksters, but more for the intriguing choreography. Jessica Ho and Hannah Hunt sit, crawl under or stand on chairs, creating the kind of striking poses that any artist would love to draw. Of course they move with every angle, bend and turn of the torso carefully calibrated. Ms. Ho remains mostly on the ground, often curled up like a ball, while Ms. Hunt is upright, twisting her shoulders and thrusting out arms. The stage goes dark again and again so that the next time we see them, they have moved, along with the chairs. Toward the end, Ms. Hunt stands on top of chairs that have been stacked, and Ms. Ho huddles beneath. 

Bruce Wood can do no wrong, and a small dance for a big thing showed again his gift for the understated. Like the solos Surrender and The Edge of My Life … So Far, his new work a small dance took Jennifer Mabus through a minefield of emotions. Literally and figuratively she travels from worry and despair to graceful acceptance. 

The program also included Contemporary Dance/Fort Worth’s rather murky after dust, before dawn; a lovely ballet on pointe called entwine by Colleen Pagnotta for DanceTCU; and Susan Douglas Roberts’ ambitious Invisible Song for DanceTCU.

With odd lighting projections that featured balloons, drifting feathers and falling old-fashioned suitcases, and a floor littered with suitcases and with dancers dressed like characters from a period drama of the early 20th century, Invisible Song scattered men and women in what might be a large railway station. They race about in confusion, grabbing a suitcase, opening it to pull out objects, swinging legs and arms and heads wildly with suitcases as propeller, or simply sliding along the platform only to jump up.

It had the heady, urgent energy of travelers unsure of their destination. 

◊ Margaret Putnam has been writing about dance since 1980, with works published by D Magazine, The Dallas Observer, The Dallas Times Herald, The Dallas Morning News, The New York Times, Playbill, Stagebill, Pointe Magazine and Dance Magazine.