The dance department’s Spring Informal concert is usually a full bill of pieces, since any student can show work.
Friday night’s free 25th annual Spring Informal at the Grace Street Theater was short, and not even very sweet.
The concert lacks a juried selection process unlike other performances. The show was anyone’s chance to show their choreography. You don’t even have to be in the dance department to participate.
So why, oh why, were there only five pieces this year? The show barely lasted 25 minutes.
The stand-out piece was “Surveillance,” a video-dance piece choreographed by junior dance major Ami Dowden-Fant and performed by Dowden-Fant and Danielle Currica.
Dowden-Fant’s choreography is playful and fast-paced, and the video shows excellent use of editing techniques. It is shot outdoors in many locations: Parks, parking garages, stairs.
Professor Robbie Kinter was videographer and editor of the dance film. He makes it look as if the dancers run behind one tree and then leap out from another. All of this is set to the psychedelic, rhythmic, cacophonous music of Japanese all-female band OOIOO’s “UMA.”
Senior dance majors Sarah Ross and Heather Schrock are two dancers with strong personalities and muscles. Together in an untitled piece without music, they explore each other’s weight and will-power. It is an intimate and athletic contact-partnering piece.
The next dance department performance is the spring senior project concert “Sociometry.”
It will surely prove to be a much more full evening of dance, as there are nine seniors presenting the work that represents the culmination of their four years at VCU.