'Prayer' makes dramatic season opener for Texas Dance Theatre

Dance review: 'Prayer' makes dramatic season opener for Texas Dance Theatre

03:06 PM CDT on Saturday, September 26, 2009

By MANUEL MENDOZA / Special Contributor

FORT WORTH — Bruce Wood’s elegant new dance, A Prayer for Mary Catherine, was the highlight of Texas Dance Theatre’s season-opening performance Friday at Scott Theatre.

Prayer is the first piece created by the Fort Worth choreographer since he closed down his world-class company three years ago. It began with ballet mistress Emily Hunter en pointe, shuffling upstage with her back to the audience. Hunter and the other female dancers wore gauzy white gowns as they executed Wood’s mingling of traditional ballet vocabulary and inventive modern movement.

The first section featured an inward-outward dichotomy. Hunter would fold into herself like a woman in distress, then suddenly burst open her body as if she had found some relief. The 10-minute piece ended as dramatically as it began, with Hunter again facing away while another dancer flitted across the stage under fading light.

Artistic director Wil McKnight has assembled a crack company of classically trained dancers who showed crisp technique throughout the night’s four pieces, even the less successful ones.

Penny Askew’s Vigil failed to build emotional momentum despite the mournful Rachmaninoff music and the black smocks worn by Hunter, Lauren Collier, Josie Baldree and Julie DuBois. Props rarely work in dance, and the umbrellas carried by the dancers limited their movement. Occasionally an arresting moment emerged, as when the four women echoed one another in a beautifully timed series of staggered pirouettes.

Like Vigil and Prayer, McKnight’s Eight Lines was performed en pointe. McKnight, a veteran dancer new to choreography, showed a command of ballet language and an eye for taking advantage of his dancers’ skills. Dressed in simple red slip-dresses, Collier, DuBois, Hunter and Rebecca McManus appeared to defy gravity as they bounced on their toes to circular Steve Reich music.

Hunter’s Marimba x 4 was the evening’s most dissimilar dance and as inventive as Wood’s. The dancers wore black body suits while enacting a playful ritual of leg slaps and hip and shoulder sways while giving one another the thumbs up.