Full Circle Dance Company’s Alicia Williams. Photo by Brion McCarthy.
Full Circle Dance Company’s “From the Source of Our Power” at the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Meyerhoff Auditorium was a well-curated and well-attended affair featuring work by choreographers Morgan Sledge, Allison Powell, Nicole Tucker-Smith, Hope B. Byers, Misty Borst Yackshaw, Alicia Williams, Travis D. Gatling, and Full Circle Artistic Director Donna L. Jacobs. Every year Full Circle structures their main offering around a single theme. This year’s theme is Power, and each work took a different approach in their query of it with explorations of political power, physical power, and the power of family, community, and the self, among others.
…well-curated and well-attended…topical…
Powell’s “Crash” was an excellent example of ‘do, don’t show-and-tell.’ Hard-hitting and punchy, dancers Nyah Banks and Josette Chang began in chairs before flinging themselves and rolling across the stage to the sound of a car crash. “Crash” could not have been more than a few hundred seconds and the dancers kept the intensity turned up to eleven the entire time. From the audience it felt like a single impact as the structure of the work transferred the force through a focused point. It performed the act of power it was meant to signify rather than simply showing two people getting hit by a car. Similarly, in what was clearly an emotional experience for the performers, Tucker-Smith’s “Birthrights” was performed by the choreographer and her daughter, Nala Smith, a student at the Morton Street Dance Center.
The narrative works on the program, Yackshaw’s “The Ceiling” and Byers’ “1868: Liberation and the Ever Lashing,”were also effective. “The Ceiling” was an abstracted story of women growing up into a corporate culture of isolation and abuse. Divided into three parts, the piece began with four dancers in pink and orange, skipping rope and playing hopscotch before realizing they are beginning to grow up. Youthful and humorous, it was a sharp contrast to the second section. One dancer, Kakuti Davis Lin, lands in a job at an office. There she is buffeted around the stage by aggressively regimented formations of dancers in white shirts and black pants. Under a gray backdrop and flat lighting, Lin, still in bright pink, popped in a cinematic corporate-dystopian way as she navigated the violence. This section came with the evenings only content warning, for abstract references to sexual assault. The work resolved in the third section as the entire cast returned. They emerged in pink and orange once again, but this time as adults, in a portrait of community and solidarity.
The evening closed with Artistic Director Donna L. Jacobs “The Source of Our Power” with costumes by Kabibi Ajanku and an original score by Jasmin “Jazzo” Walters. At the end of a performance with costume color pallets primarily in pink and orange and black and white, the dazzling, dark-azure of Ajanku’s tunics had a stand-out effect. With their structural construction, they looked almost like armor. As the dancers morphed through sections defined by a voice asking, “Who?” “What?” “Where?” “When” and “Why/how,” there was an almost kaleidoscopic effect. The dancers were all moving together, but never in identical ways, as unisons and variations on the movement rippled across the group.
The work that is lingering with me the most after this performance is Byers’ “1868: Liberation and the Ever Lashing.” “1868” was a historical narrative chronicling the Black men who were elected to local office following the American Civil War and the subsequent backlash that led to the founding of the first domestic, American terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan. As a matter-of-fact voice gave a museum-like narration of the history, a legislature of four dancers was forced to incorporate four Black legislators. The more abstracted sections—as the Black legislators danced with each other and together with the rest of the legislature—were punctuated by a White dancer in a festive, top hat walking across the stage to pull sections of a white poster from a large carpet bag to slowly assemble on a black board downstage left. From the second section of the theater, the poster itself was difficult to see but as the dancers onstage responded to each reveal, the message became clear: promise made, promise broken. As a choreographer, Byers did a compelling job of developing simple phrases into sophisticated assemblies. The costumes, with concept by Byers and design by Terry Walker, were also notable. Their half-black, half-white design made a clear point. They also felt historical, but in a way that suggested being out of time more than referencing a specific moment.
Writing from the other side of Tuesday’s election, “1868: Liberation and the Ever Lashing” feels specifically topical and I am looking forward to future productions of the work.
Running Time: One hour and 30 minutes including one 10 minute intermission.
“From the Source of Our Power” ran November 2-3, 2024 presented by Full Circle Dance Company at the Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218. For more information about Full Circle Dance Company. please go online.
