Deborah Slater Dance Theater: Hotel of Memories ? (more) Furniture Dances, May 26, 2006

Deborah Slater Dance Theater?s seductive Hotel of Memories ? (more) Furniture Dances, an elaboration of last year?s highly touted Furniture Dances, is something like Garbo?s Grand Hotel under the management of Marcel Duchamp. Dancer Patricia Jiron and singer Dina Emerson are the Dadaist maids presiding over an abstractly Old World setting in which an inspired series of dreamlike vignettes blend movement, gesture, words, caricature, and mundane objects in new figurations of space and thought. The original title comes from a line by composer Erik Satie, whose Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes figure here in various, sometimes devilishly oblique ways as part of the opulent ?musical furniture? making up a hauntingly animate aural environment, one that joins the work of musical director and composer Jonathan Segel with additional compositions (and live performances) by Thom Blum, Emerson, and Erling Wold. As for the physical furniture, artistic director-choreographer slater?s impressive dancers manipulate everything from aluminum chairs to a slanted table, a sofa, and an inflatable mattress, turning them into weightless ideas of themselves in ongoing negotiation with their troubled, ecstatic, melancholic human counterparts. In short, there?s never a dull moment at the Hotel of Memories, where wry humor and a mood-altering entropy continually reconfigure the rootless lives of its residents, and make every beat an unexpected, revelatory pleasure. (Avila)

Official Website: http://www.artofthematter.org