Dance - Spring forward

Spring is typically the swarm season in the Atlanta dance scene: the busy time of dance festivals, year’s end showings from academia and a general, sap-flowing restlessness among all to get moving in the rites of spring.

??
So it was a bit unnerving when this spring started out with only a whisper of shows. Never fear, fancy footwork fanatics: Two new dance companies and one veteran company in a rejuvenated space are stepping out to give us a late-April rush.

??
Former punk rocker Blake Dalton, for years one of the most distinctive dancers in Atlanta, introduces his new company to Atlanta April 29-30. Crossover Movement Arts draws heavily on Dalton’s training in the martial arts. “If you study the roots of most dance forms,” says Dalton, “they relate to the martial arts.” Workspace, a laboratory showing of works in progress set to live guitar and percussion by Colin Bragg, will include a sword dance, tango lessons for the audience (Saturday only) and a performance by Crossover’s East Coast freestyle pole posse.

??
Brooks & Company Dance is the creation of Jo Brooks, who says, “Most of our mission is based on taking full-length ballets and reworking them to do weird and scary things to them.” But on April 28, the company will show a series of contemporary vignettes in Shorts. The show includes “For Which It Stands,” a 9/11 solo set to an Ani DiFranco spoken word piece, and “Going Gently,” a duet of “violent love between two women, which I think, especially in younger lesbians, is pretty common.”

??
Abiding the Southern meme, the venerable Room to Move Dance moves out onto the porches of the newly renovated Chastain Arts Center to take the spring air and perform the final installment of Wrap Around Dances on April 29. Director Amy Gately offers selections from Refuge: avian-inspired movement originally created for a theatrical collaboration at Actor’s Express. No pantomiming parrots, the dancers use subtle spine and sternum work to capture a sense of merely skimming the ground in a place of both lamentation and, appropriate to the season, rebirth.

??
Workspace, April 29-30. Crossover Movement Arts, Several Dancers Core, 139 Sycamore St., Decatur. Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m. $5-$10 donation. Shorts, April 28, 8 p.m. Brooks & Company Dance, Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery, 290 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. $10. 404-522-0655. www.eyedrum.org. Wrap Around Dances, April 29, 1, 2 & 3 p.m. Room to Move Dance. Chastain Arts Center, 135 W. Wieuca Road. Free. 404-252-2927. www.roomtomovedance.org.