BOLERO+ show in review image

Ingrid Ferdinand and Santiago Villarreal in the world premiere of Sarah Slipper's Down the Garden Path. Photo by Blaine Truitt Covert.

BOLERO+ show in review

October 19, 2022  |  News



Oregon Arts Watch
reviewer Max Tapogna was wowed by our 2022-23 season-opening show, BOLERO+ OCT 14+15 at the Newmark Theatre, noting "..the audience saw flowers clenched between a dancer’s teeth and passed around like a baton, ripped to pieces, and falling suddenly from the sky...In Down the Garden Path, a world premiere by Artistic Director Sarah Slipper, flowers took on their age-old significance: romance. Slipper crafts a compelling mise-en-scène. More than once the audience gasped...the dramatic effect of the 19th-century novel...Narrative, character, and bodily pleasures of any kind are not to be found in Ensemble for Somnambulists, the 2006 work by guest choreographer Luca Veggetti. Somnambulism, or sleepwalking, is a mood Veggetti successfully captures onstage. Microphones hang in the air, as dancers recite—ASMR-style—a text excerpted from Anaïs Nin’s surrealist novella, House of Incest...Veggetti’s dense and uncanny composition would be equally at home in a contemporary art exhibit as in the Newmark...Bolero is a visual feast: the music a canvas upon which Rustem has painted exacting stage images. A ramp rises horizontally upstage, and behind it dancers often peer out at the audience. A spotlighted face here, a silhouetted leg there. Over the course of the performance, the dancers fight for the rose, which is the thread that ties Bolero together. The flower would vanish and then reappear a moment later, always in the hands—or mouth—of a new dancer.

Read the full review HERE.