The City Dance- Meh, it could have been better

I was excited to go to this TBA event- water and dance, two of my favorite things, together at last. But what I saw was disappointing. The music I actually liked a lot- no complaints there, it was great. I went to 3 of the 4 pieces, the first one I went to again on the second run through so I could see if I liked it more from a different angle. I did, until the hula hoops came out. Anyway, here is my completely non-professional opinion, with some very unprofessional photos. I wish I had a good camera, but they intimidate me.
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Keller Fountain

Performance 1

This blue thing (water- get it!) shades musicians nicely, but blocks the view of everyone on the right side of the fountain, so we missed a lot of what was going on in the front. I heard several people complain about how poorly planned that was. Taken during the second run of the performance.

It did look cool to see them all on the fountain, but the dancing didn't do it for me. As you notice, they're wearing blue, like water! The people not in the water wore white!

As a friend of mine said, there's dancing, and there's dancing around. Today's pieces looked more like dancing around to me, with a little splashing around for good measure.

Also, apparently when I was 5 (or 26, cause I still do this) and kinda danced around in the pool with a few ballet movements, I was being innovative. Who knew I was such a natural choreographer ahead of my time? That's pretty much what this piece looked like. They used the architecture of the fountain well- dancing on all parts of it, using all the levels, but they didn't use the water as a thing. Maybe that wasn't the point, but I would have liked to see them use the water a little more than just jumping in it and splashing around. For most of it, the water could have been there or not, the only difference was the dancers were wet. Or cannonballed into the little pools. It was kind of like that waterworld skit at Universal Studios- climbing up ladders, splashing the crowd, falling in the pool with their heads dangerously close to the edge. But at Universal Studios you expect it to be a little hokey. As I said before, I was a little more convinced on my second viewing when I had a better view (despite the annoying blue tent thing) until they started hula hooping. I was thinking OK its a wave motion, like the water, but is it necessary? In the program it states that is a reference to Anna Halprin, the choreographer who was part of the inspiration for the show, along with her husband who designed the fountains. But couldn't they have come up with a better way to reference her that wouldn't make people roll their eyes? And the bathing references? It just looked like the dancers were hot and were taking advantage of the water to cool off. So I thought it was OK, but not great.
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Pettygrove Park

Mike Barber- his face is very expressive, which I love. The dance itself- not so much.

Looks like a member of a deranged color guard got loose and is going after the woman in the wheelchair!

This is apparently part of the audience "participation"

The second piece- I hated it. It is rare that I don't like a dance performance, I can usually find one part I like. Not this time- other than the music, the lead violinist sounded excellent. In this space the audience was cued to move around which in the program is explained as "participating." I enjoy performance or visual art pieces that incorporate participation, but being herded around by volunteers or having a piece of blue fabric waved in my face does not seem participatory to me, just irritating. Blue waving fabric- I think its that water reference again! Did I mention these pieces were done around fountains? Just in case we forgot.

Anyway, at first the audience sat in the center of four hills, in a recessed concrete space. Since everyone was sitting you could see OK, but not everything. And it didn't seem like they were using the space so much as the hills just happened to be there. They could have done some cool partnering/weight sharing using the uneven surfaces, but alas, they did not. At one point Mike Barber was standing right in front of me, and instead of being excited that I might get to do something, I was annoyed that the blue flag thing was close to my face. The dancers looked like some kind of deranged color guard.

Then we were herded onto 2 of the little hills. Some of the dancers kept walking through the crowds waving the flags of irritation. Then there was some running around and yelling "wait" and "walk the dog" while they shook their tail feathers. Maybe if I was 5 I would find this amusing. I read in the program that they were playing musical telephone with quotes from the Halprins' work with another musician, Pauline Oliveros. Perhaps I am just simply too pedestrian to understand such an obscure musical reference. I don't know, either way it didn't do anything for me. The program also states that the choreographer Cydney Wilkes wants to "creat[e] opportunities for the performers" instead of "imposing [her] aesthetics." Hmm, maybe if there was more imposing it would have been more interesting. No one in the small group I was with liked this piece, and since we are all dance lovers, I wonder if other dance lovers in the crowd had similar negative feelings.

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Lovejoy Fountain

The dancers boogeying down to the performance space

This location was the easiest to see, and I liked how they were using the water more

What did the poor piano do to them?

I liked this piece, until the ending when it went downhill for me. Part of it might have been that this location had the best view, but I also liked the movements better. They were using the water and the architecture of the space. I would never be able to do this piece, I'm way too clumsy. They were climbing up the stairs where the water runs down, walking monkey-like on the edge, and I feared for their safety. At one point a single dancer stood under the waterfall on the right, her arms stiff at her sides, twisting from left to right, it matched perfectly with what was happening musically. They used the water to make hand prints on the wall, poured it out of cups, and squeezed it out of sponges on each others' heads. And it looked like choreography, less like they were just hanging out in the fountain which is what a large part of the water-portions in the first piece looked like to me.

The last musical piece (the only music part I disliked) was strange. According to the program it is inspired by Anna Halprin's first musical directors who got rid of "any traditional sense of musical form, [and] replaced [it] with the 'ancestors of the wild sounds.'" In this rendition, the ancestors of wild sound were apparently garbage cans and chains dragged along the ground, and then various things beating on the piano and scraping across the strings. No thank you. It was like a wannabe stomp, but without any recognizable rhythm or focus. To make it more awkward, at some point people in TBA volunteer shirts who were in the audience space started to dance- the kind of dancing that seems neither here nor there, like are they supposed to look awkward or is this part of the "minimalist" thing? I'm not sure, but my friend and I didn't like it and didn't want to watch. Nor were we inspired to see the last solo piece, so we had lunch instead.

In conclusion- eh, I've seen better.