NobleMotion Dance’s Storm Front: Experience the Elements

 

By Claire Christine Spera

NobleMotion Dance makes things look easy, in the best way possible. Co-Artistic Directors Andy Noble and Dionne Sparkman Noble’s choreography may be astoundingly athletic, fast-paced, driving; but the company of 10 sure-footed dancers makes it all look like a breeze. In their latest production, Storm Front: Experience the Elements, that “breeze” was both figurative and literal.

Take the first piece on the program, for example: Artistic Director Noble’s Kinky Kool Fan Blowing Hard featured three industrial fans producing winds that blew the dancers around the stage. The swaying, folding, swiveling choreography mimicked the movement of a plastic bag floating through the air, taking unexpected turns. The music — which encompassed everything from a string quartet to hard rock — was the backdrop for a full range of controlled abandon.

Flash Burn, so titled in reference to the shadows burned into the ground after an atomic bomb drops, continued the elemental theme. Set to the sounds of a tornado siren, the post-apocalyptic piece was gritty and sooty. Ash rained down on the dancers from the sky, as they confusedly crossed paths. All was jagged, frantic, skeletal. Frenzied pirouettes gave way to stumbling steps, and the dancers shielded their eyes as bright searchlights betrayed their locations.

Man-made problems were front and center once again in Wasteland, choreographed by Noble and Jennifer Mabus. The dancers waded through a stage littered with heaps of trash, approaching each other with inhales and exhales that had the result of inflating and deflating each other’s bodies. When more garbage began to rain down from above, they addressed it with leaf blowers, spewing it across the stage.

The 34-dancer Tower was enthralling. It opened with the stage filling with fog to the sound of thunder. A storm was coming, and it showed in the choreography (by Noble and Laura Harrell).

Thirty-four bodies is an impressive number on the Hobby Center’s Zilkha Hall stage, especially when they’re organized to fill the space without it looking overwhelmingly crowded, which is exactly what Tower managed to do. The dancers marched with high knees and flexed feet — like soldiers preparing for battle — as the storm approached. Then, a frenzy began through the mist. With the tension building, they twitched their arms as though shaking invisible people by the shoulders, and erupted into jumps. It was just the right amount of chaos, with lifts, swift turns and bodies sliding across the space.

Then, release: Rain began to fall. The dancers looked upward, swaying their bodies gently. The tension had broken; calm reigned.

And that’s what walking out of the theater felt like: For all its impressively high-energy pieces, Storm Front was, ultimately, oddly calming, in the best way possible.

Claire Christine Spera is an Austin based dancer and writer.