HQ Review: Resilience Dance Company opens its season with ENTRY POINTS
Resilience Dance Company’s fifth annual concert, Entry Points, was performed at the Center of Creative Arts’ Catherine B. Berges Theatre on October 30th and November 1st, 2025. The evening featured two new works as well as one reprised from 2023 and an expanded piece from 2024.
The opening half of Entry Points showcased three works—No Agenda by Hélène Simoneau, Cannibal by Mike Esperanza (first presented in 2023), and Pulse by Jorrell Lawyer-Jefferson. These pieces kept their focus on the dancers’ daring physicality and agility, with bold partnering, rapid-fire sequences of quick and dynamic choreography, soaring leaps, and high extensions, often set to pulsing scores. While similar in tone and cadence, these works primarily showcased technical skill, presenting a demonstration of the company’s abilities. Collectively, the works established a cohesive rhythm and visual language for the evening. Their shared emphasis on physicality created a clear baseline from which the second half could intentionally diverge.
The second half of Entry Points brought about a striking shift in tone. Just, a thirty-five-minute work by Annie Rigney, was shown in an expanded form following its premiere last year. While allowing, as in the first half of the evening, ample space for the dancers’ technical acuity to come through, the piece put new demands on their artistic and performative range. The result was a profound and moving exploration of connection, memory, and fragility.
Just began with a track of lively conversations overlapping with one another. The curtain came up to reveal one dancer wandering around a mostly empty, dimly lit stage. The set suggested some version of domestic life with notable surreal or uncanny elements – one dancer began the piece by lying motionless onstage, tangled in a wooden stool; large pieces of furniture were piled precariously high in a corner of the stage, and a living room set would eventually appear and be treated as a jungle gym. More dancers appeared on stage, dressed in skirts, dresses, button-downs, and pants in various warm shades of pink, brown, and green, rearranging furniture or collapsing to the ground. The dancers moved through tableaux of conflict, repose, and tenderness – shifting furniture, clothing, and bodies around the stage in wide arcs or in sudden scattering movements. The dancers' movement quality was luxuriant and dynamic, falling and rising with breath, carried by repeated gestures, and punctuated by violent thrusts or sudden falls. There were often multiple scenes unfolding simultaneously, layered across one another on the stage. Each audience member had an unusual amount of agency — it was not always clear who we were “supposed” to be looking at on stage. We had clearly been dropped into the middle of a fully formed world and were tasked with finding our bearings; the action would not stop for us.
Especially poignant were the final moments of Just – a duet centered around a table and chair, performed by Josiah Gundersen and Abbi LeBaube. Despite, or perhaps because of, the sudden barrenness of the stage following thirty minutes of dense movement and sound, this final scene was the most potent of the night. In a brief interview posted on Resilience Dance Company’s social media account, Annie Rigney says of the work that it touches on “all the unseen forces that exist between two people in a love story.” In this tender and volatile duet, we saw the quiet distillation of those powerful forces.
It was Ursula K. Le Guin who said, “the truth is a matter of the imagination.” When she created stories, she was writing of “the present, disguised.” Just – with its visceral, often uncanny, imagery, nonlinearity, and porous, ever-shifting structure — embodies imagination as a form of truth-telling. Just presents a living, breathing tableau of relationship – exploring the lived experience of human connections, replete with contradictions, and often haunted by shared and private nightmares.
Photos by Lumosco