Urbanity Dance Makes Performance Debut at the Institute of Contemporary Art

Local performing arts non-profit World Music/CRASHarts presented Boston-based contemporary dance company Urbanity Dance’s first full program at the Institute of Contemporary Art on Feb. 20. The show’s five pieces offered an exploration of elemental forces—of light, gravity, and energy itself—while remaining rooted in human emotion, engaging with both the audience and the performance space around it.

A central idea of the show was the theme of light. “The title of the show, ‘Bend,’ refers to light—how we manipulate and see light—and that is the thread connecting [the pieces],” says Alex Lorditch, Urbanity’s chief of staff. For instance, “They fell,” the inaugural Boston performance of a collaboration between Urbanity’s founder and director, Betsi Graves, composer Ryan Edwards, and artist Jeremy Stewart, explored the interaction between light and the human body. Stewart placed an infrared camera over the stage that followed the dancers, who appeared at times to spread pools of light around their feet, at times to sweep away or magnetically attract dark particles of shadow. “The piece really became a duet between me and the lighting designer,” company dancer Brian Washburn said in a Q&A after the show.

In a similar vein, “Photo Box D,” choreographed by Andy Noble, began in darkness, with a dancer pointing a tiny flashlight at herself and illuminating short passages of motion. Floodlights in rectangular boxes then blazed into life at the back of the stage, drawing blinks and gasps from surprised spectators, who suddenly found themselves, rather than the performers, in the spotlight. The dancers moved into and out of the pools of light created by the light boxes in an attempt to draw awareness to unseen portions of the dance. The interplay between dancers and light raised a question that Lorditch describes as: “If we don’t see something happen, does it happen?”

Several other pieces addressed the physicality of dance itself and its struggle against or transcendence of weight and gravity. In “hi how r u? can u enable me 2 enable u again? k thx bye,” choreographed by Graves, dancers repeatedly built and disassembled a pyramid of their bodies. The dancers began by attempting to sit upon the shoulders of the smallest of the ensemble, who then slipped out from underneath them, until the larger male dancers sat down to form the base of the pyramid. “Ocellus,” a 1972 quartet by the American modern dance company Pilobolus, continued this exploration of weight and power: the slow, acrobatic movements of the dance, sometimes bordering on contortion, demonstrated the athleticism of control and gradual motion.

Standing in contrast to these two pieces was “(r)evolve,” choreographed by dancer Jaclyn Walsh of contemporary dance company Keigwin + Company. Where “hi how r u?” and “Ocellus” engaged with gravity, emphasizing the force required for the dancers to lift their bodies into handstands or to support other dancers on their backs, “(r)evolve” explored the bounds of the normal laws of motion. At one point, the dancers even used turning boards, plastic strips that reduce the friction between a dancer’s foot and the floor, to enable them to spin faster.

For Urbanity, the ICA itself also served as an important part of the performance. “A Boston dance group is rarely asked to perform at the ICA, and it’s a huge deal and a huge honor to be representing Boston dance,” Lorditch says. Urbanity’s performance engaged with their venue and the various genres of art housed within it in novel ways: for instance, “Photo Box D” examined the process and aesthetics of photography. “The whole conceit of [“Photo Box D”] is that all the lighting is photography equipment,” says Eleanor Regan, the company’s development director. During the piece, camera-like flashes transformed the movements of the dancers, visible to the audience for only a second at a time, into a series of still photographs. Extending the show’s conversation with other art forms, dancers in the second Graves piece became human architecture as they constructed their pyramids, and in the Pilobolus piece, dancers resembled slowly moving statues, stone or clay come to life.

But for all its academic exploration of light, movement, and space, the performance closed on a lighthearted note. As the show drew to an end, the company offered a tribute to its home city: beaming dancers leapt onto the stage to take their bows dressed in scarves, earmuffs, and woolly hats, set to the tune of the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun.”