Kayt MacMaster

Based on deCamp's experience growing up in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago in the 1960's, Urban Renewal reveals the commonly kept secrets of an era through memories, perceptions, and politics couched cleverly in deCamp's unflinching personal narrative.

The depth of Uchizono's work is palpable. It is a masterful revelation of the density of fear, disquietude, and the ever-present passage of time.

With intervallic thrusts of kiss-and-tell performance, myendlesslove plunges further and further into the depths of heartbreak, and it is not the kind of heartbreak that we recover from experiencing easily, even as a third party.

Throughout 'Endangered Pieces' there are episodic shifts between boyhood and manhood, mortality and immortality, and purpose and preoccupation, all of which seem to be existing in a shadow cast by an unknown, impending disaster.

If the original Rite of Spring was a stone dropped into a calm and unsuspecting pool of water, then "A Rite" magnifies not only the ripples on the surface, but the speed and velocity with which the stone fell and the effect of its reverberations on bodies of water for a century.

THIRST uses the structure of Dante's Inferno to examine the role of suffering in the human experience. Throughout the work Song-Begin, costumed in layers of black, performs an on-going solo. The audience accompanies Begin-Song, like Virgil accompanies Dante, into the various realms of the underworld of the human experience.

Zustiak's trilogy The Painted Bird is rare in the sense that it is as intimate as a personal narrative and as authentic as historical nonfiction. Collaboratively, The Painted Bird is a genius production. The full experience is accessed because of the multi-dimensional approach to dance theater production - superb lighting, brilliant musical composition, skillful and straightforward performers, and authentic costuming. Essentially, Zustiak conveys many visions as one vision. He tells many stories in few words.

The Tiffany Mills Company crowned their participation in Brooklyn Academy of Music's new Professional Development Program with performances of two dance works. "The Feast (Part 1)" and evening-length work "Berries and Bulls," bring focus to Mills' signature interest in the dynamics of relationships, which are explored through text, improvisation, props, and partnering.

Everyone gathered at DanceAfrica, regardless of race or origin, was invited and involved in the experience. The promptness of New York City seemed to be momentarily soothed with a sense of eagerness to just enjoy an unaffectedness moment of celebration.

All elements of the evening's performance were stunningly crafted and stand individually as great works of art, but the pieces lack certain cohesiveness that binds all aspects of a performance together. Melding two worlds to create one work of art is a beautiful challenge, and the Leon/Lightfoot effort exhibits abundant ideas between the two of them. What is missing is an agreed upon through line that serves to streamline the work and become the stamp of polish and finesse that Jiri Kylian left on the company many years ago.

Some say that the eyes are the window to the soul, but Rosie Herrera's evening-length work, Dining Alone, offers an alternative. Based on her childhood experiences observing people eating at her father's restaurant, Dining Alone reveals a particular fascination with solo diners, examining the solidarity of aging, the innate nostalgia involved in the full sensorial experience of eating, and the true connection between nourishing the body and nourishing the soul.

Watching Gwen Welliver's "Beasts and Plots" is a bit like thumbing through a stranger's accidentally forsaken sketchbook. Metaphor stabs at experience, revealing a private and fanciful world in unembellished candor.

The theme of inquiry is particularly evident in the thirtieth season celebration, Play and Play: An Evening of Movement and Music, presented at The Joyce Theater. Play and Play is, as it turns out, a masterfully assembled works-in-progress showing of two current pieces, "Ravel: Landscape or Portrait?" and "Story/."

Motionhouse, the UK- based contemporary dance company, presented their latest evening-length work, Scattered, at Pace University's Schimmel Center for the Arts on Tuesday, February 12. The company's New York City premiere engagement, Motionhouse delivered their trademark athletic physicality with rigor and precision, but the theatrics and stagecraft of the performance did not lend to a truly unique and reality-bending work of art.

VEAL is not easily categorized or described; it is an experience. The fusion of sculpture, opera, dance, and live music is methodical, yet there are moments, particularly in the dancing, that have been highly constructed but ultimately left to chance, elucidating the "posthuman" concept that Harrison Atelier continues to so thoroughly investigate. No matter the level of organization, method, and planning--there will always be a part of the creation that the creator cannot control.

Rosie Herrera Dance Theatre was anything but cautious, reserved or subtle for a first-timer. Hailing from the hot city of Miami, the company presented "Various Stages of Drowning: A Cabaret," a work as vibrant in color as it was in character.

'You're Me' provides the opportunity to revisit a bizarre, half-resurrected memory and realize that it can stay bizarre and half-resurrected. Let that be the new name for nostalgia, and you can sprinkle baby powder on it, eat some of the fruit being passed around the theater on silver trays and wonder what on earth they could think of next.

Cleverly disguised as magical play, Anne Juren and Annie Dorsen make speculations about feminism's role in the past and present by reaching deep within the body of the female psyche, forever expressed as the place where all natural things begin, to find batteries, a strand of lights, and a movie projector.