Last weekend I explored rural Pennsylvania (wandering, not lost) on my way to Pittsburgh for the last dance in the Friday night show of Point Park University’s Student Choreography Project. My sister Kassandra’s dance, now titled (dis)connect, closed the show. Her piece last year was chosen from the same concert and went on from the regional competition to the biannual American Federation of College Dance Festival in Washington, D.C. last May; the expectation of her teachers and peers was another dance with large cast and three intersecting movements. Instead, Kassandra choreographed an ensemble piece for six (five performed the final piece—the injury/surprise cast change plot twists in dance movies are true) that explores movement without narrative.

She readily admits that this sort of experiment is only possible with an extraordinary cast, and the weekend before the show, her dancers stretched a photo shoot outside the Mellon Institute into a three-hour affair, causing gawking, accidents, and general mayhem on Fifth Street in Pittsburgh. Kassandra shared these spectacular images with me last Saturday and I felt they deserved an online gallery; the site, disconnectdance.com, also includes cast biographies, a choreographer biography, and a bit of explanation about the dance. We’ll be adding a video clip soon, and I should say that the site looks best on Safari, only because the Safari chrome interface matches the color scheme of the site.

(One of the dancers, Cindy Edmondson, also took new images of Kassandra at the Mellon Institute that are posted on Kassandra’s site.)

When I asked Kassandra what the dance was really about, what she’s been thinking about lately in the studio, she told me (dis)connect was about negative space—reinserting meaning into moments where dancers touch and communicating why they often cannot. After four years at Point Park, her choreography remains notably lean—the dancers must repeat technically challenging strains without the embrace of those around them on stage. This repurposing of steps and absence of the breaths that contemporary partnering usually offers makes for an intense, and ultimately unifying, participatory audience experience—exactly what Kassandra intended.

Related posts:

1. Clean-licked ears, slicing sharply
2. Return of the Macro
3. The Swank Easy in Pittsburgh

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Posted Friday, October 13th, 2006, 8:15 pm * Filed in Design. * . Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.