Dance - Chutes and Ladders
Like some latter-day Dante directing the movements of mortal husks both damaged and whole, Douglas Scott presents both heaven and hell this weekend in Crawl/Climb.
The artistic director of Full Radius Dance, a physically integrated dance company with both disabled and able-bodied dancers, Scott previously showed the evening’s two feature pieces separately. Full Radius first scratched and bit its way through the bestial inferno of Crawl at March’s MAD Festival. And the uplifting paradise of Climb premiered this April at the Inman Park Dance Festival. This weekend, Scott brings the two companion works together, and both works benefit from the proximity.
Crawl is thundering and violent. The dancers often touch, selfish and hostile, with breaths abrupt and out of sync. Pairings are parasitic, often back-to-back, and quickly broken. Laurel Lawson leaps and crashes the combined weight of her body and wheelchair into the floor like an ambitious demon demanding entrance to a circle of damnation. Atlanta Ballet refugee Nicola Ayoub convulses and contracts into her abdomen with her hands held to her head like Eve just after the Fall. Ayoub, Lawson, Scott and Jojo Butler knot themselves in a pile like worms contending for the soil.
The attitude of Climb is entirely different, though many phrases echo those in Crawl. The dancers hold and settle into one another in balanced geometries, breathing together. Limbs uncurl into smooth arcs and long, ascendant lines. The dance begins as a trio, with Ayoub entering about halfway through as a newly risen soul. At first, her entrance upsets the dance’s mathematics. But as the other dancers figure out how to integrate her, the whole becomes stronger and accelerates into a greater ecstasy before the four finally part, glancing back tenderly as they go.
The show also includes a revisited production of Scott’s silly-cynical romance romp The Wounding of Cupid; the premier of the urban cage rage People in the City, choreographed collaboratively by Butler, Ayoub and Lawson; and a performance of Pamala Jones Malav’s Shards by guest company Good Moves Consort.
thomas.bell@creativeloafing.comFull Radius Dance presents Crawl/Climb June 3-4 at 7 Stages Theatre, 1105 Euclid Ave. Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 3 and 8 p.m. $12-$15. 404-724-9663. www.fullradiusdance.org.??