HQ Review: MADCO closes its 50th Anniversary Season with SHIFT
On April 9-11, MADCO closed out its 50th anniversary season of performances at COCA’s Staenberg Performance Lab with Shift, a concert featuring four world-premieres staged on the company this spring, and one returning work by 2024 guest artist Lily Sheppard.
The evening opens with Carly Vanderheyden’s “Echoes in the Drift,” a tender work ebbing with gentle rememberings. The work begins with a warm and pensive solo performed by Sidney Cowles, floating themes of walking fingers, sinewy shoulders, and sweeping legs, which continue to reshape and reinvent themselves as the six remaining dancers tangle into the space. Sounds of tides and draping, blue-toned costumes suggest a moment of seaside reminiscing, tracing fingers in the sand and reflecting on all the ways our lives perpetually drift.
Bringing with it a stark contrast of energy, Lily Sheppard’s “It’s Uncanny” highlights some of MADCO’s greatest strengths as a company. Heavy precision, grounded athleticism, and charged emotions pulse through its veins. The work’s most striking image is its opening - all five dancers seated in a line pounding their legs in quick shifts. The machine-like clarity and intensity of the work seem particularly uncanny against the spacious, melodic piano score.
From this tightly wound intensity, the evening expands into the theatrically cinematic world of Gianna Burright’s “Oddities” with the churning sound of an old film reel and the twinkling of a music box. Six women dressed in whimsically victorian-ish swaths of mismatched skirts, corsets, and pirate shirts scatter curiously among an eccentric array of wooden chairs, some balancing them on heads, others sitting in imaginative orientations. Eventually, the dancers discover joy in swinging a chair in one large huddle, and an almost pub-like atmosphere erupts through the room. There’s laughter and storytelling amidst a vast, layered scape of bodies and chairs, moving with joy and power. As they tire, they find their way back to their seats, pounding their chests with a percussive slap to the heart, alternated against a release of their bodies into the chairs in a steady rhythm that refuses to resolve. Lined up in their chairs, slouched with knees spread apart, the dancers stare down the audience with an unenthused and unrelenting gaze. They smear their lipstick, freshly applied, as if wiping a stout from a beard, one of many gestures in a larger conversation on womanhood that is seated at every corner of the work. The tapestry of movement builds and settles back down into a refreshingly cinematic end as the dancers captain a rocking ship built of chairs, bodies melting eternally off the sides like waves.
Where “Oddities” explores masculine movements in feminine forms, Artistic Director Arianma Russ’s “So I Fit” sits in notable juxtaposition. A duet between the company’s two male dancers, Daryon Kent and Logan Guerra, the work is filled with fluid musculature and poetic turmoil. Spirals of tension and release lead the movement, gripping fascia visible through their backless black dresses, silenced only by brief moments of exhale.
The evening culminates with “¡Oye!” by Brian Josiah Martinez in collaboration with the dancers, an ode to the choreographer’s Colombian heritage, and a fitting confetti-filled finale for the company’s 50th season. The dancers, dressed colorfully, sprinkle the space with subtle shimmies of their hips and shoulders, a quiet deconstruction of a party. As the stunted movements build in intensity, confetti begins to burst from the dancers’ chests, their faces beaming with uncontainable pleasure. Though teeming with all the makings of an exciting party, the atmosphere in “¡Oye!” is much quieter with a slightly somber tone. In an attempt to re-experience her initial burst of joy, one dancer gathers her confetti from the floor and tosses it back into the air, but finding the spark to feel less and less bright with every attempt. In the end, she is left gathering confetti while a straggler from the now-vacated party taunts her with more confetti, humming along to the now distant Latin jazz.
For fifty years, MADCO has served as a staple in the St Louis dance community. In its precise physicality and range of movement vocabularies, Shift not only honors the company’s long-standing legacy, but highlights how the company has continued to evolve and innovate. The evening marks a notable shift for the company - not a re-invention, but a re-emergence of the company’s values and value to its community as it marches forward into its next fifty years.
Photos by Carly Vanderheyden