Bates Dance Festival presented a luscious performance by Kate Weare Company on July 28th.  Wisely, the Saturday night programming included an Inside Dance pre-performance talk by dance critic Debra Cash.  Ms. Cash took just the right amount of time to illuminate the choreographer’s approach and give us some reference points.

Kate Weare has built a white hot trending company that does not count beats.  Instead, the dancers co-locate their highly synchronized parts by listening to each other’s breaths.

From the front row, at performance time, I could also hear them breathing.  Knowing their lungs were the bellows to propulse minds, tendons and ball-joints toward precisely executed micromovements added new layers of sensory information and interest.   This is hypersensitivity at its best, derived from the very seat of our animal intellect.

At a certain point, the medium of contemporary dance approached in this way triggers a particular sublimity.  Embodied skill becomes the material from which art is made.