Dance Review: Deborah Colker – Mix

A group of 17 brilliant dancers storm the stage with highly physical dance, bordering on gymnastics and acrobatics, praising the beauty of the moving human body.

Mix is composed of six consecutive, non-related short pieces.

This is a format that worked for decades for many modern dance companies and that still prevails in the USA, but dwindled in Europe, where priority was given to full evening creations of contemporary dance, with aspirations for higher complexity and intellectual depth. This structure is perceived as somewhat dated, and is often found in dance which aims to entertain, and Mix was certainly entertaining.

Colker (52) is enormously energetic and fit, and her perception of dance is tightly connected with physical manifestation, the way sport is. The grace of the dancers, their obvious strong training and discipline did justice to the choreography which often relied on unison execution, and brought out the detailed specific esthetics of the dance.

The company’s exclusive sponsor is a large oil company and their funding enabled different set for each section. They say that money talks, but the three oversize wooden chairs that almost blocked the space in one section didn’t, and the choreography around them didn’t clarify their presence either.

The cherry on the cake, and the most intriguing set, was the huge climbing wall, a terrific playground for the fearless dancers, which supplied a unique dynamics and an original movement lexicon which was great fun.