'Full Tilt' dancers can't hold back

Sometimes theater provides an experience where you hold your breath because you don't want the spell to be broken by some misstep or even a cough. Audiences may find themselves breathless for most of the 33 minutes of "Landscaping for Privacy," the centerpiece of the "Full Tilt" dance concert opening tonight at Rose Theatre.

"Landscaping for Privacy" is as intellectually engaging as it is physically enthralling, a dance theater piece that manages to be both sublime and confrontational in posing questions about American society.

Choreographers Josephine and Paul Zmolek mine the suburban '50s for dances in which 10 women perform various household tasks and beautifying acts while a male, perhaps a dehumanized pencil-pusher, sits staring at a console TV. They coddle and even try to seduce him, but he sees right through them to the TV spouting ironic jingles about products and progress.

The Zmoleks have said "Landscaping for Privacy" asks what Americans give up in order to have what we have. The sound of Beat writer William S. Burroughs reciting his hard-edged poetry sets the questioning tone. Electronic music by John Cale and '50s band leader Raymond Scott alternate with pastoral sounds as the dance builds to its conclusion.

Near the end, Julie Stoverink, Becky Wolverton and Dan Graul sing a lament: "Them that work the hardest are the least provided," it goes.

Graul dances the part of the cathode ray-struck male, mostly in his chair but at one point standing on top of it. The other dancers, all talented, are Laura Brazer, Clare Crouch, Amelia Essman, Maria Foster, Heidi Froemsdorf, Casee Hagan, Shiho Kawamura and Katie Stricker.

Perfectly attuned

"Landscaping for Privacy" is constantly intriguing, the dancers are well-rehearsed and perfectly attuned to the spirit of the piece entrancingly lit by technical director Ken Cole.

"Full Tilt" has many other reasons to recommend it, including three well-conceived student dances. In "Primitive Fire," choreographer Maria Foster uses a percussion soundtrack and African dance moves to create a hypnotic female ritual. Dancing are Foster, Mia Cox, Gwendolyn Evans, Heather McCutchen and Hailey Priday.

The possibilities of six dancers, three chairs and an avant-garde funk-jazz soundtrack are explored by choreographer Jennifer Hembree in "Staccato's Theme." Costume designer Rhonda Weller-Stilson has the dancers in various modes of black and white, and the dance is entertainingly Fossesque at times. The dancers are Jennifer Brandt, Meagan Edmonds, Heather McCutchen, Hailey Priday and Katie Stricker with a solo by Whitney McCann.

In "Commissioned," choreographed by Laura Brazer, five lithe dancers dressed in gray costumes that could be uniforms spin with abandon, run, limp and struggle to percussive sounds.

The dancers are Amelia Essman, Stephanie Gibson, Hailey Priday, Katie Stricker and Becky Wolverton.

"Full Tilt" artistic director Dr. Marc Strauss choreographed two of the works: "Someone to Watch Over Me," a dramatically melancholy solo he dances to the on-stage trumpet and piano accompaniment of Dr. Marc Fulgham and Becky Fulgham; and "Silence is Golden," in which students Jennifer Brandt, Gwendolyn Evans, Jennifer Hembree, Melissa Upton and Emily Wilson don student Marcus Stephens' otherworldly costumes dance to sounds that don't resemble music. The latter challenges our ideas about what a dance performance should look and sound like.

sblackwell@semissourian.com

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