Dance review: Bodytraffic channels James Brown and Peggy Lee in a blast of pure uplift
Superhoned L.A. troupe plays it light, blending styles and letting loose in a crowd-pleasing program
Snap’s ode to the Godfather of Soul is '“super bad” in the best possible way. Photo by Kevin Perry
DanceHouse presents Bodytraffic at the Vancouver Playhouse until May 6
TALK ABOUT “feel-good” programming—James Brown’s “I Got You”, set on repeat, expressed through flapping arms, gyrating hips, convulsing torsos, and high kicks.
Los Angeles’s honed and hyper-energized company Bodytraffic is in town with Snap, a piece that channels the Godfather of Soul. And it is super bad in the best possible way.
Choreographed by former company dancer Micaela Taylor, the piece samples, deconstructs, and loops Brown’s hits, composer SCHOCKE synthesizing the instantly recognizable snippets (“ba-by-ba-by-ba-by”) into an original electro score. It’s not parody, just sheer loving release in tribute to Soul Brother Number One.
And the joy-starved Vancouver audience ate it—and the other three uplifting pieces—up. It was a perfectly timed bit of programming by DanceHouse presenters.
Bodytraffic puts a range of popular and street styles together with virtuosic techniques into its unique blender, raiding American music and pop culture for many of its creations. The dancers, to a person, are outstanding—honed, athletic, and fully committed to the sometimes wild, sometimes goofy moods of each piece. (In one, a running joke is that they dump water on each other.) The work that Bodytraffic performs is so fun that it’s easy to forget the class of dancer that’s in front of you—but only for a moment, until somebody pulls off a killer turn or flies across the stage in a superhuman jeté.
Because of this rigour, the admittedly light evening doesn’t feel like it’s pandering or cutesy. About the only piece that didn’t quite connect was the opener The One to Stay With—possibly because it tried to mix deeper messages (a central vitrine collected water in what could be a symbol for the climate crisis or the opioid crisis) with parodic or light-hearted sections.
As any comedian will tell you, it’s not easy to be funny—and often you have to put yourself out there. That’s certainly the case for the warped Dean Martin ode Pacopepepluto, by Madrid-born, Chicago-based Pacific Northwest Ballet resident choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo—another standout, and crowd-pleaser, on the program. In it, three insanely cut dancers—Joan Rodriguez, Pedro Garcia, and Guzman Rosado—cavort to old Dean Martin hits in G-strings, like David statues coming to life, then letting loose in cartoon abandon.
But perhaps the most resonant message of the night comes at the end of prominent American ballet choreographer Matthew Neenan’s charmer, A Million Voices. Set to the songs of Peggy Lee, it mashes the retro-American, the swingy, and the carnivalesque—for their spin on Freedom Train, the dancers even move their legs like the chugging pistons on locomotive wheels. At the end, wearing sad-clown collars and holding tightrope parasols, the dancers parade across the stage to the strains of Lee’s famous lines: “If that’s all there is...Then let’s keep dancing. Let’s break out the booze and have a ball.” Words to live by in post-sixth-wave pandemic times. Excuse me while I drink to that.
Related Articles
