CSULB Dance Company prepares for season

By Sharon Christensen, Online Forty-Niner

Thursday, November 19, 1998

One has to love modern dance if for no other reason than to see the artistry of classical dance combined with the freedom to add a motor scooter.

The Cal State Long Beach Dance Company's fall 1998 concert does just that.

After over two months of rehearsal, the CSULB dance department is performing its seasonal program, featuring six premieres performed and choreographed by CSULB faculty and students and two works by guest artists, this weekend.

Director and CSULB professor Pat Finot is premiering her two group works: "Long Ride in a Slow Machine" and "Short Ride in a Fast Machine." Both are set to the same energetic John Adams score but are completely different in range of motion.

"Long Ride in a Slow Machine" is, as its title would suggest, the slower, more introspective counterpart featuring ten dancers in purple and green costumes laying hands on each other, pulling at their hair and nearly posing while perched on five round pedestals. "Short Ride in a Fast Machine" is more frantic and jubilant with the same ten dancers smiling broadly and running around the stage. Its climax is one dancer riding a scooter, complete with streamers on the handlebars, around the stage.

"It was just for the fun of it," Finot said about the scooter's appearance.

Finot said she wanted to use the same music not only for fun but to show two sides of the same, fast-paced soundtrack.

"I heard the music and was very excited by it," said Finot. "It moved so fast." So she choreographed "one (piece) paralleling the energy and one moving through the energy."

"The dances are so different that the music doesn't sound the same to me at all," said Jaime Shapard, a senior dance major. "The music means something different in each dance."

"The Man That Got Away," a solo piece choreographed by CSULB graduate student Casey Carney, will be performed by CSULB professor Jeff Slayton. Accompanied by the Judy Garland song of the same name, Slayton takes on three different personas in this cabaret-inspired piece with blue lighting, falling glitter and stars projected on the stage. Dressed in purple satin pajamas, Slayton moves from diva taking the stage to has-been, hiding a decrepit-looking hand to acknowledge piped-in applause.

The highlight of this weekend's program is the adaptation of Bill Young's "Fault," the modern dance equivalent of a gang fight with a scream as its soundtrack. The 30-minute-long piece is full of enough raw aggression in the choreography and discord in the music to give the audience a collective ulcer.

The dancers involved in "Fault" rehearsed every night for two weeks for four to six hours to accommodate the guest artist's schedule, said Shapard.

"It's a privilege to be in a guest artist's piece," said Christie Freeman, a junior dance major performing in Finot's pieces as well as Susan McLain's "Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Love and Marriage in 9 Minutes and 45 Seconds."

McLain's piece, premiering this weekend, is a duet portraying the life of a couple, from initial passion and romance to emotional separation and neglect. McLain's work is the only piece in the program to have added dialogue.