In its recent review of FLOCK & Artists’ Somewhere Between, Picture this Post called the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago “arguably the best venue to see dance in Chicago”:
Sometimes in duets, and most often as a six-dancer ensemble, Flock’s Somewhere Between continues to mesmerize with seamless transitions. We lose track of time. It’s not unlike the hypnotizing effect of a lava lamp. All is fluid. Transitions are so seamless we only realize they have happened in retrospect….
The music and lighting flow seamlessly also. We hear an electric sitar much as one would in an all-night Indian music performance at which we fall in and out of sleep. Then there are only chords. A light is bluish. Then not. Like the music and the movement, we don’t feel change in the moment but always with a backwards blink.
…As is typical of performances at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago—arguably the best venue to see dance in Chicago—the audience is packed with admiring students whom we imagine are still tingling from the excitement of training with these dancers.
Irene Hsiao for the Chicago Reader writes:
With a quality that is both liquid and articulated, jointed and limbed throughout, the interlocking partnering among the dancers, who move as if with one pulse to an ambient soundscape, produce forms that evolve and develop like watching an agave bloom in the fluctuating luminescence of a desert sky. Moments of simultaneity and abstract form (and the persistence of a balletic lineage) cede to the sudden tenderness of an embrace.
In addition, Bridge Chicago noted the work’s unique movement and “the dancers’ excellent performance of that movement, ” going on to explain:
Throughout the piece this group of dancers elegantly and seamlessly move in and out and through each other offering arms, legs, torsos, heads and shoulders to catch weight, travel through space and unleash dynamic phrases of weaving limbs and bodies. Each section offered an ever more complicated mass of physical interlacing and intertwining, and the moments of unison dancing presented a joyful respite coupled with a renewed desire to witness another series of organically intricate dance phrases. Julie Ballard’s excellent lighting shifted with each section reflecting off the white surfaces, bathing the performers in color and giving the entire stage an ethereal otherworldly feel.
Read the whole Picture This Post review, as well as coverage in the Chicago Reader’s Trilogy of terpsichore, See Chicago Dance’s Preview of the performance, and Bridge Chicago’s review of the performance.
