Dance On Site Festival 2012

Next Reflex Dance Collective curated the Dance On Site Festival for a 3rd year. This year's festival was full of spontaneous and exciting dance that filled the streets around the Gallery Place Chinatown area of Washington DC. This two day festival featured work by Sandra Atkinson, Roxann Morgan Rowley, Erika Surma and a collective improvisation by the dancers of NRDC.

All the work transformed the spaces the work inhabited and made the viewer really stop and access the movement that was happening.

Sandra Atkinson's work "The Importance of Touch" filled the US Navy Memorial with fluid movement, the dancers audible reactions to each other and a beautiful violinist whose music complimented the dancers chaotic but organized web like pathways. Sucked into the dancers complete dedication to touching, reacting and resisting each other the audience succumbed to the idea of touch and relationship. Atkinson found a way of making us feel the dancers touch and possible agitations from being touched.

"Torque," seen in three different ways at Judiciary Square Park, blended into the surroundings and added a calming breeze to the site. The dancers movement was clear, concise and soft. Moving between giant concrete columns this work asked the audience to see different perspectives of the duets unison movement. Clad in white the dancers often blended into the serene green spaces but only for a brief moment before reappearing and spiraling into magnetic partnering resulting in soft slow orbits around each other.

Roxann Morgan Rowley's "Airing the Dirty Laundry" erupted in Judiciary Square Park transforming the space into an unsettling blur of quick movement, quick partnering and resulting in the dancers removing an outer layer of clothing. This piece offered a very different tone than Surma's work. The dancers frenetic movement created a sense of anxiety, and almost like a train wreck you wanted to look away but were drawn into what might happen next.

In "The Grid" NRDC shows a strong sense of working together as an ensemble. The improvisation of one dancer calling out coded commands to the rest worked well for the heavy trafficked sidewalk space in front of the Portrait Gallery. Dancers flung, worked through, weaved, twisted and leapt in varying directions, by solo, duet or trio through the "grid" of stationary dancers.

A person spontaneously happening on any of these performances couldn't help but take notice of these experimental site based works. What a treat to be downtown and find yourself in the middle of a dance. Begs the question are you suddenly part of the piece? Look forward to Dance On Site 2013.