BWW Reviews: GALLIM DANCE Gets Weird

Gallim can be translated from Hebrew to mean "heaps." It is appropriate that a performance from Gallim Dance brings heaps of physical movements and heaps of creative thought. Gallim Dance is the brainchild Artistic Director and choreographer Andrea Miller. Miller's key innovation is remarkably imaginative movements with extreme physicality. Gallim Dance's DC premiere at The Landsburgh Theatre, co-produced by Washington Performing Arts and City Dance, thoroughly exemplified these ideas.

As education is a critical arm of Gallim Dance's mission, Miller and several of her dancers have been in residence with City Dance's conservatory students. Through this program, Miller set excerpts of her work, Wonderland on the students, which opened the performance. Wonderland's tone was immediately defined before the lights came on, when the students sang a high-pitched and sped-up version of the Mickey Mouse Club theme song. After the lights came up, upbeat jazz music filled the theater and the students scampered around the stage imbued with youthful energy and maniacal laughter. This profound effect may only be recreated on an upcoming season of American Horror Story: Dance Company. Half-way through Wonderland, the tone changed as the music slowed and the dancers' movements became grounded, serious, and unexpected. Like the work's namesake, it allowed the students to inhabit a new and strange world. Gallim Dance's residency has exposed these students to alternative ideas of what dance can be.

The meat of the evening was Gallim's performance of the hour-long work Blush. It featured six dancers, in simple black costumes and covered in white make up. Miller's choreography was primal and animalistic. Every movement exploded with energy and precision as the dancers underwent an emotional metamorphosis. They began with desire, then aggression, and then cycled through innumerable others (including overwhelmed) until finally ending on joy. Perhaps the most striking moment in the piece was the all male pas de deux that examined the development of trust between two individuals. Throughout Blush, Gallim's dancers became visibly tired and their white make up began to smudge and smear. This added to the authenticity of the emotional roller coaster and made the final discovery of joy truly triumphant.

Expressed through Gallim Dance, Andrea Miller's work is wonderful and weird. She takes risks and is not afraid to fail. Both Wonderland and Blush were mesmerizing creations. My performance companion remarked, "I really liked that and I don't know why, it just made me happy." Miller produced authentic emotional reactions from the audience because she refused to play it safe. This proves that sometimes the best choice is to dive headfirst down the rabbit hole.

Photo credit: Franziska-Strauss