THE DANCE SAMPLER
at Northeastern Illinois University
Najwa Dance Corps performed Frokroba, choreographed by Yao Marshall and staged and directed by Najwa I, an energetic initiation dance from the Malkine people of Guinea in West Africa. The eager audience enthusiastically solicited a brief encore. The Hatzabarim Israeli Folk Dance Company did three dances, each more showy than the last. The final work, Kormim–The Vintners, is almost a dance sampler of its own, incorporating the steps from many kinds of folk dance. (Because Israel is such a recently formed country, its “traditional” folk dances draw on several cultures, and the “folk” have had the liberty of choreographing some pretty stagy pieces.) Their first dance, Roeh v’Roah–Shepherd and Shepherdess, had a number of characteristic fluttery hand gestures, the hands held high above the head, which a little girl next to me unself-consciously tried to imitate.
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Akasha Dance Company, which could not appear because it was giving performances at the Weinstein Center for the Performing Arts, was represented by a video, “Remote Control”–a section from Remote, choreographed by Ginger Farley. In the age of technology, you can be two places at the same time, and this fast-paced MTV-style tape enhances the feeling of our modern frenzied pace: images of the dancers performing are interrupted by close-ups of celebrities flashed for a millisecond. Then back to the dancers in their practical and unflattering beige costumes. Even when they’re shown in an occasional close-up, the medium of video distances them from us.
