WORLD SCIENCE FESTIVAL
Theater at Cedar Lake
547 West 27th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through June 6, $30, 4:00 & 7:30
212-352-3101
www.armitagegonedance.org
www.worldsciencefestival.com
New York-based choreographer Karole Armitage believes in five primary principles when it comes to dance: “Seek beauty. Show mutability. Move like a blaze of consciousness. Perfection is the devil. Express the eroticisim of gravity.” She brings all that and more to “Three Theories,” running through June 6 at Cedar Lake. Part of the World Science Festival, the evening-length piece is divided into sections that depict the Theory of Relativity, Quantum Theory, and String Theory. The eleven-person Armitage Gone! Dance company display their impressive muscularity and explosive vibrancy throughout the performance, which begins with a prelude in which men in black briefs and women in black bikinis reenact the Big Bang around Megumi Eda, one of several stand-out dancers (along with the lithe and agile Kristina Bether-Blunt and the creative Leonides D. Arpon). Heavily influenced by Brian Greene’s book THE ELEGANT UNIVERSE, Armitage has her dancers weave and gesture to suggest an abstract visual language of physics, evoking curved time and space, especially during the Quantum section, when Clifton Taylor’s lighting switches on and off, making it seem like the dancers are particles appearing and disappearing to Rhys Chatham’s pounding score. (Chatham also did the music for “Bang,” with Sangeeta Shankar and Ramkumar Misra handling “Relativity” and John Luther Adams’s “Dark Waves” anchoring “String.”) Masayo Yamaguchi and Marlon Taylor-Wiles turn up the heat in one sexy duet, while Emily Wagner and William Isaac show off their ballet skills in another lively pairing.
Michio Kaku and Karole Armitage discuss the phsyics of dance at the World Science Festival on June 4 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The show might not help you understand the work of Dr. Stephen Hawking or even Albert Einstein, but it continually thrills and delights. However, the Saturday evening perfomance will be followed by a discussion with Armitage and physicist Lawrence Krauss that should prove educational; the June 4 show included a talk with Armitage and Michio Kaku that was both funny and fascinating.