Popular Dance Company Uses Technology During Performance

Andrea Miller’s “Gallim Dance Company”, made their world premiere performance of an evening’s length work, Fold Here, at the Alexander Kasser Theater on September 26th of this year. Choreographed by Miller herself, Fold Here was originally inspired by Raymond Carver’s short story, Cathedral, a story in which a man’s hand is guided by a blind man’s heart in his own illustrations of a cathedral. Miller collaborated with Israeli video artist Tal Rosner and American lighting designer Robert Wierzel on this project as they created a universe where the many individual cardboard boxes represented the basic units for all of life’s existing matter. Miller's work is completely cutting edge and new and like the world of education, the dance world is integrating technology into their everyday lifestyle. Their performance was filled with lights and projections unlike any other performance I had ever seen. This inclusion of technology in a famous dance company would serve as en excellent class trip for students studying dance. They would be able to see that professional dance is using technology in rehearsals and performances. They also will be inspired by the beautiful dancers and choreography used in this show. Hopefully the connection of technology and performance will help them realize that their studies in dance must go hand in hand with their knowledge and comprehension of technology. 

Each one of the dancers were artistic and technical geniuses. Like most of Miller’s pieces, this piece possessed a hint of humor, not the type of humor that was overt or cheesy, but humor that was inherently built into the movement. The dancers delivered this humor with the comedic timing of some of the most well trained comedic actors. These dancers were so fluent in the vocabulary of Ohad Naharin’s Gaga technique. It allowed for a freedom and release throughout every one of their movements as they danced with a visceral, organic, yet surprisingly powerful style. The dancers knew the extreme limits of their bodies as they jumped to the highest of highs and possessed some of the deepest most grounded plies I have ever seen. They were animals, not one of them moving exactly like the other!

From a production stand point this work was a true spectacle. The use of lighting to cast shapes and images upon the cardboard boxes with which the dancers’s played was visually stunning. The dancers effortlessly moved in and out of movement phrases, interacting with the cardboard boxes, manipulating them as well as the shapes that appeared on the boxes themselves. It was as if the dancers had some sort of telekinetic control of the images. This allowed for many points of interest as the dancers were able to create relationships with each other and the images casted on cardboard boxes.