Wolf Tales Re-Imagines Fairytales and Fables

Wolf Tales is “a kick in the pants.” NW Dance Project’s annual holiday tradition continues and the dancers took over our winter 2018 show at Lincoln Performance Hall. Wolf Tales served up five new works created by company dancers Kody Jauron, Franco Nieto, Andrea Parson, and Anthony Pucci, all inspirdby classic fairytales and fables. Of course, they twisted them a bit. Oregon Arts Watch noted, “Wolf Tales, the droll and sweetly macabre new program from NW Dance Project, is something of a case of mistaken self-identity. Nobody seems to know who anybody is at any particular time, even and perhaps especially themselves, since the characters in this mythic wood seem to be going through some downright werewolfian transformations…This is the slot in NWDP’s season that’s usually turned over to the dancers to create, and in this case, rather than making a series of independent short pieces, they’ve stitched the thing together to create a narrative arc…Wolf Tales delivers a pretty high payoff…a kick in the pants. The show has a looseness, a frivolity, that doesn’t always show up in the company’s more earnest works. Freed from being the vessels of someone else’s choreographic imagination, it seems, dancers just want to have fun…the fun’s infectious…you’ll probably laugh. Who knows? You might even howl.”