Review: Sunday’s Fall for Fall Dance served a full menu of highs and lows

Sunday’s Fall for Fall Dance performance at Uptown Atlanta — the third and final evening of this year’s festival — drew attendees into an expansive atrium with soaring ceilings, corporate-adjacent gathering spaces and intentional informality.

Settling into an afternoon of 14 works delivered by independent choreographers with radical differences in aesthetics and experience was a challenge. This diversity was true of the audience too, uniting serious dance goers with others who laughed at anything that may have been unfamiliar.

The program brought up several questions: Who is this experience for? Can younger artists and new dance-makers grow from this type of exposure? Does the “familiar” further alienate aficionados? Does “out there” work alienate those already tentative about seeing dance?

Amidst highs and lows, two solos were examples of thoughtful choreography for the self, with each soloist delivering a performance that created intimacy within the vastness of the space.

Angelita Itzanami’s work was based on her longing to stretch time. Her intuition and almost unfathomable emotional range drew us deep into her psyche while she literally stretched her physical limits, reaching in opposing directions, pulling herself apart. This courageous and sparse work relied on the futile desire to forever hold onto —  what? Love? A family member? A memory? This quiet desperation was unsettling and mesmerizing.

Masterful craftsmanship paired with intriguing delivery belonged to Emma Morris. Bolstered by witty, dramatic lip-synching and carefully layered sound, Morris took us into the tumult of frenetic thoughts and memories, weaving a story that was uniquely personal.

Morris’ power on stage revealed itself in effortless extensions of a leg that would light onto a fourth position stance, then collapse the entire body to the floor with delicacy and precision.

Multimedia artist-turned-dancer Jacqueline Hinkson made her choreographic debut with a work that embraced provocative and surprising moments. Inner-soil: TILL/HARVEST was a gentle voyage that avoided traditional choreographic logic with spellbinding moments of breathy attack and unseemly weight sharing.

Profectus Dance presented an excerpt by Melinda c. Jacques that grappled with crossing over into new beginnings — in this case, dying. The work found its pulse when dancers interacted with a shallow, diagonal line, placed downstage right. There, they taunted the line, almost daring one another to cross over. Prior to this, the work embraced traditional vocabulary, peering, almost longingly, into something akin to compulsory movement. For this reviewer, the dancers’ pained facial expressions and mime-like actions shortchanged the impulse to any deeper movement investigation.

The afternoon was a conveyor belt of eclectic Atlanta dance. From TaShibaDance’s West African inspired presentation to the moody Garage by New York choreographer Jordan Ryder (also seen on Friday), Fall for Fall Dance is grounded by the generous and entrepreneurial spirit of its founder and emerging choreographer, Catherine Messina.

She performed a duet co-created with Meg Gourley, aptly titled We Let our Hair Down. It was a reflection of the bold, cosmic energy that drives Messina. Through wit, engaging vocabulary and a devil-may-care attitude, the duet, like the afternoon, did something many are often afraid to do: let go of pretension, deliver levity and push the boulder of dance advocacy up a very steep hill.

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Born in Tehran, Iran, George Staib is of Armenian descent. He has lived in the United States since the age of 10, when his family was forced to flee the Iranian Revolution. He is the artistic director of staibdance and a professor of practice in the dance program at Emory University.