Dance Alloy shakes it up to poetry at the Byham tonight

Nothing Like the Sun

Dance Alloy

Tonight

Byham Theater

Student tickets…

Nothing Like the Sun

Dance Alloy

Tonight

Byham Theater

Student tickets $10.25

(412) 456-6666

What movements separate you from everyone else? Is it the way you walk, your gestures, your mannerisms, the way you reach out to touch someone? Is it the way you dance to the music or, for that matter, how you dance to the words? What is it that makes you appealing or attractive to other people?

In Dance Alloy’s production “Nothing like the Sun,” artistic director Mark Taylor addresses these questions through his artistic, visually pleasing, intense choreography. Five dancers also work to answer these questions through their movements, their facial expressions, and their connection with the music and the words.

Taylor took a different approach to choreography with this piece. He chose love poems by William Shakespeare, Henry Constable, Walt Whitman, W.B. Yeats, Sara Teasdale, Dorothy Parker and Anne Sexton.

Actors Tom Langdon and Sheila McKenna read these poems with gripping and articulate voices. According to Taylor, his standard for choosing poems was “a sense of movement, a sense of passion.”

Along with the poems filled with passion and poignancy is background music – African drum beats, works by Azzam Ali and Antonio Vivaldi act as a filler to the poetic words of classic and contemporary poetry. Taylor matched each poem with a type of music and each music/poem collaboration with a dancer. The rhythmic words and musical notes evoke movement and the dancers speak through their bodies, their pointed toes and their articulate and graceful arms.

The Dance Alloy company consists of five expressive artists displaying various genres of solo work. Gillian Beauchamp, Lisa Jones, Andre Koslowski, Gwen Hunter Richie and Michael Walsh each add an artistic flare to the tempos in the poems and musical notes.

Walsh begins and ends his solo with the same movement as though he’s hindered by terminal lovesickness. Koslowski dances to a staccato poem where the repetitive verse, “Her face, her tongue her wit … so soft so sharp …” speeds up while his movements reflect the pace and tempo of the poem.

Jones tries to escape love. “I am not yours, I am not lost in you,” are words from her poem sequence. Beauchamp is very intimate with her movements. She draws the audience in with not only her body, but with her direct eye contact and intense facial expressions. “We were in our own bodies and you were in my mind,” are words from her poem.

“Nothing like the Sun” is one of three pieces that will be performed at the Byham Theater this evening. The two other pieces are titled “Get out of the House” and “What if: Translocations.”

“There is such pleasure in moving,” Taylor said. And there is such pleasure in viewing his artistic work.