Elm City Dance Collective…Cake Face…Scapegoat Garden…these are names in Connecticut’s regional dance ecology.  Look them up, enjoy them, support them, and/or find out who’s doing similar work in your own community.

http://elmcitydance.org/

http://cakefaceart.com/artwork/1452631_st_petersburg_times.html

http://www.scapegoatgarden.org/

It takes many layers of cooperation and commitment to bring a dance work from concept to concert.  Elm City Dance Collective did an exceptional job producing the recent REBOUND dance festival presented March 24, 2012 at ACES Performing Arts Center on Audubon Street in New Haven, CT.

Contemporary movement celebrates the relevance of human physicality in an age of dislocation and virtual connection. While more abstract choreographic vocabulary can be experienced as a form of sculpture with the added dimension of time, more folkloric forms such as  tap stand as a source of embodied history and cultural heritage.

The array of questions posed by a single dance piece to which one brings an open mind and an ounce of thoughtful attention is truly dizzying.   If you haven’t yet enjoyed this branch of the performing arts, do try and treat yourself soon.

Don’t worry if some of it is bewildering or you don’t know when to clap.   So much of adult life is learning how to negotiate awkwardness – dance performers and audiences find their way through these moments all the time.   They give us great examples of  how to do that, really.    And like Rilke says, we can “…try to love the questions themselves…”